Inktober 2022

 Just got to the end of Inktober this year. It has been a challenge. Very few of the words have lit my boat, as it were. But it's been worth pushing through that. Getting outside my comfort zone. 

I also give myself the limitation of not spending much more than 20 minutes on each one. After all there are lots more things to do in a day. So they are almost all disappointing in that they are not finished, polished works. But they have been opportunities for me to try different things, so are valuable in that sense.

PS It must still be Sunday in Google Land, hence the date stamp on this post.

PPS I just noticed that I didn't update #16  word. Ir should read "Fowl".

First Light

 Another postcard. Sometimes you see something and the shape is so cool it burns itself on to your retina. You know you have to use it. Starting from that lovely bum in the middle, I had to work out what other elements to include and organise them around it.

I wasn't sure what to do with the background until quite late on. I walked into a room and saw the shadow cast by the venetian blinds on the wall and bed head. I love the sharp angle it makes in contrast to the round smooth bum.

In the end I feel it has more of a Shunga vibe to it than any of my other naked women. Like Utamaro at his most restrained.

Personal Archaeology

 I found this in the bottom of a drawer. Letter to The Guardian December 16 1986. I'd half forgotton about it, but Gosh. Half a lifetime ago and I was a master of art bollocks even then.

There are lovely bits in it, and some of it makes me laugh, even now.

"Nostalgia" appears to have gone the way of all things, replaced, perhaps, by "ideology" as the insult of choice for both sides in an argument.

Plus ca change...

Pictures at an Exhibition (Tweaked colour)

 So. Having tried out over-printing the same block with different colours, I'd got a better idea of what I wanted to achieve. In the first version I printed an orangey red over a more greeny blue, and the result was a tad blackish. This time I used a more purply red over blue (still a bit greeny), resulting in a better purple colour.

I wanted to make more of the yellow to contrast with the purple, so I made another block to print some yellow over the white as well as over the other colours. I'm happier now.

Pictures at an Exhibition (Colour experiment)

 I made several drawings of gallery visitors when I was looking after various exhibitions over the last year. I wasn't sure what to do this last weekend so I went through my sketchbooks in search of something. I combined these people who came and looked at the gallery on different occasions and made the place look more crowded than it was.

I thought I'd try adding colour by inking the block partially with different colours and see how they come out. I'm reasonably happy with this, though I think I'd like to tweak the colours a bit and maybe use masks when inking - what I did was just roll the ink roughly where I wanted it. I also didn't really let the ink dry between impressions, so it's overprinted quite patchily.