I was walking through
the studio on Friday and noticed a distinct lack of home made drawing tools. If
you go into any artist’s studio you will always find a whole range of them,
whether the artists are primarily painters or drawers they will at one time or
another have had to make their own equipment, because what is out there on the
shelves of art shops just doesn’t cut the mustard. One of the key ways to
develop a signature drawing style is to make individual marks that only you are
using. By making your own tools mark making can be opened out to a much wider
and more unpredictable range of visual qualities.
The classic way of
going about this is to cannibalise anything you find in the vicinity, try
taping, tying or wiring a whole variety of things to sticks, dead paintbrushes
or anything else that might serve as handles. Try to make small as well as
large applicators and think about how you will apply ink or paint to them. Old
paint trays or washed out foil trays from takeaways are always good.
Hand made tools make for interesting objects in their own right, you might try and make enough to make an entire wall of them.
Try cutting and shaping bamboo, it is of course a classic material for making reed pens, but perhaps try cutting goose quills and shaping different sticks.
Lots of materials can be developed as rolling texture tools
Try and combine soft mark making tools with harsh scratchy ones.
Don't just make tools to create single lines try multiple ones, the simplest is to tape two different pencils together.
Sometimes artists
categorise their tools in relation to where they found the materials. E.g.
kitchen tools, made from old dish clothes, mops, pan scourers, bits of plastic
from old Fairy liquid bottles, sliced up scrubbing brushes etc etc or garden
tools, made from teasel heads, leaves, plant stems, garden canes, old bits of
netting, cut twigs, etc etc. bathroom tools made from old make-up kits, cotton
wool, toothbrushes, sponges, false nails, false eye lashes, nail brushes, sliced up
toilet roll tubes etc etc
In order to experiment
with tone and colour as well as thickness and texture of mark get a good
variety of inks to dip your tools in, as well as try watercolours and any
paints that are reasonably runny.
My life drawing
sessions are moving into a new phase, I will be starting to look at how you can
develop individual approaches and part of this development will be to look at
how you are mark making, so I will be looking at doing a kit inspection. So if unsure of what to do next, spend some time making drawing tools and then try and use them to make your ideas.
Once you start struggling with new marks and their control, it is at this point that your work can often open out into new unexplored territories.
It’s not just about
making your own new and unconventional tools, you might also consider more traditional
materials, for example making charcoal is reasonably easy and you can try and ‘charcoal’
a whole variety of woods, each one will have its own unique mark trace.
There are lots of how
to videos out there, see
or you can make your own oil pastels click
When I was at college we used to soak charcoal in linseed oil, wrap it in silver foil and leave it for 3 months, it made for a very crude oil pastel.
You can make your own inks, chalks, silver points as well as of course papers and other materials. The more you get involved with the materials of your practice the more you will feel in control of what you are doing.
See also:
No comments:
Post a Comment