A Study in Blue

A great day playing wet media and big paint brushes... Just what I needed to back into a creative head space.  We were asked to bring a object in to draw, drawing from photographs is never quite the same.  I figured it would be a good idea to take something that was relevant to my brief of interesting creatures so I took in a wooden puppet dragon, something I picked up in Vietnam. 

Again in keeping with my concept of translating the traditional into contemporary design I decided to stick with a blue study and spent all day mixing various shades and tones of blue ink and procien dyes to paint large dragons with.

this is on lining paper and all the inks bled a lot making it blurry

I had very mixed results, getting used to wielding a paint brush again was fun, working on a larger scale then I am used to is quite challenging and puts me out of my comfort zone.  I decided to work on different surfaces to see how the wet media worked and it was an interesting experiment.  I painted on wood, MDF, corrugated card board, ordinary paper, lining paper and some nice water colour paper... it wasn't surprising that I got the best results on the water colour paper but some of the others were interesting.  For me this is a messy process and when I relax quite enjoyable - it will never be my chosen media but it produces some good shapes and lots to work with once scanned into PhotoShop

This was the one I liked best especially when I had worked it up a little using a sheet of acetate place on top and then adding detail with a fine liner and a gold promarker pen.  Looking forward to scanning in - tidying it up and playing further.