I keep doing these squiggles. I thought I'd never do fifty, but I'm already up to thirty-five pages of them. I have no idea why or where it's going, but I'm having fun just putting ink on paper. I just like the way ink looks on paper. I like the scratch of the pen. I like the blobs of ink. I do not like waiting for the blobs of ink to dry, but you can't have everything.
Danny has said that you should do something over and over and over again, because that's the only way you make mistakes, and making mistakes is the good part, the part where you discover things. It's not working that way for me. Mistakes are still mistakes to me. My goals with these are different, more focused, than with most drawings I've done in the past, but I still have goals.
The fact is, I'm not good at undirected behavior. Well, that's a lie. I'm excellent at undirected behavior, and I get a lot of practice at puttering, nattering, gallivanting, loitering, goofing off, and all other forms of useless action. But I'm not fully comfortable with it. I always feel like I should be aiming for something, working towards something. Usually when drawing I'm trying to get down what I see, whether in front of me or in my head. I've dropped that with these squiggles, but I still have goals: To make sure the lines don't touch; to make a pleasing composition; to be smooth and curvy; to not smear the ink with the side of my hand.
And, as you can see with these, there's a little more of the natural world creeping in. Just a little.
I started playing with other inking tools, too. I have an antique drafting kit my father bought me -- he's entirely unfathomable sometimes -- which has these ruling pens which can be set to a given line width which they will then draw consistently no matter how you turn them, which is very cool. I added some of these lines to the squiggles.
I can't say the orientation of most of these is definite, but these seem to be the way they should go.
I like these drawings. I'm not crazy about about the tree, but I really like the others, especially the double page composition. Reminds a bit of Miro, but that's a good thing, keep going with it, I think you are heading down an interesting path!
Thanks for the encouragement.
The best I can say about the tree is it was a worthwhile experiment.
Not simply to mess you up, but I think the tree is my favorite. Or, at least, the one that I can see pushing. That is, can you do the same image with fewer marks or insanely obsesive marks?
I'd say the trees are pushing in the sense that I was trying to get somewhere from within a context. Or something. I'd seen some birds in a bare tree and wanted to capture the essence of that, and since I was doing these squiggles....
That said, I think they fail. They don't work for me as evocations of the birds in the tree OR as squiggles. It was neat to play with the ruling pen, to see what I could do with it a bit.
I think I may be squiggled out anyway. I have some more I may post. I don't know.