ink – Page 4 – The Consulting Artist

Nature’s Last Stand

A continuation of my experiment with a very narrow palette of colours.

My friend Tim Baker posted this photo on Facebook recently:

Alongside it he wrote: I pass by this tree many times during the week. I finally snapped a pic. About 40 feet to it’s left the sprawl of residential development is looming. To me it represents nature’s last stand. It’s all but given up; it refuses to fall. So sad to see so much of our beautiful land disappearing.

His photograph got me thinking – and I sketched a response to it which you can see here, mounted and unmounted:

I drew this using a black Staedtler fineliner and some Faber Castell Polychromos pencils. Three shades of grey, and a blue. I sneaked in a tiny hint of yellow ink too – just to give the picture a point of contrast. The mounted sketch is on its way to Tim, I’m grateful to him for the inspiration.

Leaf – an exercise in patience

I was sitting on the New York City Highline last Sunday, enjoying the fine weather and the way the light fell through the birch trees.

I sketched a quick water colour postcard before moving on to a bar to eat pizza and watch the Giants get stuffed in the NFL.

Later in the day I got to thinking about the leaves on the trees and decided to draw one. The outline took just a minute and then I began to fill in the cell structure of the leaf. This small piece of work took me a long time, around three and a quarter hours in all. Some of the leaf was filled in at my desk in the teeny apartment I’m renting in NYC, the rest was inked in at various cafes and bars. After about an hour I confess I had a ‘wish I’d never started this’ moment, and I persisted. I’m pleased I did – the finished result has exceeded my expectations and will be a gift for Carole when I get home.

Here are a few work in progress photos

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Signals – Part One

Hi folks – my focus has been elsewhere so it’s been a while since I painted…

Hi folks – my focus has been elsewhere so it’s been a while since I painted. Yesterday I was goofing around with some new ink based pencils and made this godawful pattern, don’t worry I shan’t inflict it on you. It took me hours to construct and it was total crap. Or was it? You see – what this crap piece of work did was progress me towards a better idea. That better idea is titled Signals – Part One. I hope to evolve this pattern idea further, to me it is something about digital meets analogue, geometric meets irregular. I hope you like it and it is good to be back. This work has been mailed to someone in Tulsa, USA.

Update.

I have relented. I though perhaps it may help to show you the two previous ideas that helped to generate Signals #1. Sorry for the pinky colour – I photographed them in poor light but I hope you get the general idea.