Ink Drawings

When I returned from Japan I finished off the Reading The Signs project. I ended up using ink a lot, so when I started thinking about my Self Directed Project I wanted to try the techniques I’d just learnt in the previous project. I made some quick ink drawings of Tori gates using my own photos as reference. On their own I don’t think they are very effective, and don’t serve much of a purpose since I didn’t draw the surrounding environment, just some of the tori gates. However it did give me some ideas to use the tori gates as silhouettes. I’d need to make lots more tori gate drawings in ink to really explore the idea properly though.

Since this is the very beginning of the project I didn’t want to get too fixated on one subject so I flicked through more of my Japan photos and found these of umbrellas found in Fushimi Inari shrine. I remembered how bizarre and interesting these were to me at the time of taking the photographs, and they still are now. I made more ink drawings of these whilst implementing techniques I’d learnt in the previous project. I just wanted to experiment to see what worked. I think the ones with finer lines in the first photo are most effective. I drew these with the end of a paintbrush because I didn’t have a nib to use. This resulted in a nice variation in thickness of line which makes the drawing more 3D, however i couldn’t really control how much ink was going on the page and which lines were thicker so I’d like to do this again with a nib.