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Incredibly fortuitously timed this week my brother gave me a whole box of coloured inks he’d got from a studio sale! I want to work on my ink technique in preparation for my assignment piece which feels pretty close now. First I had a play with layering and did a series of drawings of hand gestures on coloured paper. I did them all at the same time – a layer on each page then back to the start and finished them with dip pen the next day – a sort of very lengthy warm up to get me feeling fully confident with my new inks!

I love these, it’s funny they looked pretty dull until the dip-pen and then all of them popped! Great fun to play around with colour combinations too.

Next I moved on to larger drawings working from photographs on really nice heavy white A2 paper. This is the paper I had in mind to use for the assignment but I needed to see how the ink worked on it and whether the scale would work with my brushes and charcoal. The dip-pen is so lovely but I know from  previous experience that it doesn’t have nearly the same affect on a larger scale so I wanted to make sure I didn’t make that mistake again and the style I wanted to try would scale up well.

I chose a photograph of Ott looking a bit peculiar mid-way through eating a biscuit which is one of my favourites and another of the breastfeeding photos and worked at them at the same time like I had the hands – swapping between the two so there was time for the  layers to dry.

I was so pleased with both of these but most of all the second one which I absolutely love! The colours are fantastic and the composition with the mirror is really nice. Comparing the two I found really useful – I found that the bits I liked best were the much simpler bolder areas like the chest and bits like the mirror surround where the pastel was more playful rather than the more classic hatchings on the portrait of Ottilie. The ink sits so well on this paper – it makes for a much more slick picture and gives it a print-like quality which I just love! I had a cock-up on the second picture where I let the yellow and pale blue bleed and ended up with a dark muddy green neck but salvaged it with white ink and coral pastel and it worked fine in the end, a bit of a close call though! All very good practice for the assignment.

I’d already worked out my composition for the assignment piece – now I have my colour palette, scale and drawing style!

I wanted to try again with ink working quickly from my breastfeeding photos with the slight abstraction of my previous drawing still fresh in my mind. This time I worked on fluorescent paper – in part to allow for more experimentation with colour and also partly to give a little more freedom without the crisp contrast that white gives which can make line drawings a little cartoonish. I looked at two images and did two versions of each to see if anything came through differently with the repetition.

I love these colours all set out together like this. The paper isn’t actually great for ink – it’s far too thin so warps instantly and the colours of the inks are lost on some of the coloured papers but the overall effect is rather lovely and it definitely does make for much freer drawing. The more delicate lines of the drawings on the left hand side lend themselves better to more accurate sketches – you can really recognise both of us in those drawings and I particularly like my hands in the bottom left hand drawing. I do really like the simple bold lines on the right hand drawings though. Looking at the compositions I was immediately drawn in by the bottom composition and the roundness of it all; the heads, the breasts, the arms wrapped round and even the rocking chair we’re sat in. I really wanted to build on that and have a go at a bigger drawing using these as a starting point.

Aware of the pitfalls of using a photograph I decided to try to do an ink and charcoal in a similar vein to my self portrait (assignment 4) but using only these sketches for reference. I wanted it t be joyful and full of colour and pattern and to exaggerate those repeated circles to bring the focus in to the relationship between mother and child. I worked on A2 on a medium weight paper.

I can not tell you how pleased I was with this! It’s the first time I’ve worked solely from preliminary sketches for a drawing of a person (I’ve only done it once before at all and that was in Assignment 3 – a landscape) and apart from anything else I was surprised that I got a likeness! I love the letting go of specifics to create an overall image and I love the patterns and colours, I hadn’t imagined I’d be able to make something I love quite this much without a subject there in front of me so I was really pleased with it. In fact I  was so pleased initially that I wondered if I’d even be able to better this or if this was it..! I want to try though – I have an idea in my head of how I might be able to push this further for my assignment so am feeling really excited about that, this is definitely the right path!

I wanted to have a go with soft pastels and see if I could get something of the quality of painting that I really love – I tried to keep in mind the Bloomsbury group paintings and the mother and child by Harold Gilman. I layered and re-layered pastel with water washes and ink details and went through various stages of hating it before it came to life and I was pleased with it, but I’ve dipped again and am not very keen on it any more. It has a feeling of having worked too closely to a photograph – the composition is lovely and we look like ourselves (and each other) but it feels a little wooden, like it’s missing the looseness that my sketches have. The colours are lovely but I feel like it could have done with a splash of something warmer to offset it and again perhaps if I hadn’t had the photograph in front of me I might have been more playful. It’s also the wrong paper so has warped – you can just about see the shadows in this photo which detracts from it rather!

I wanted to try a more in-depth tonal charcoal study, looking again at breastfeeding. Often with other people’s work I like the darker charcoals and with mine there tends to be a fair amount of white so this time I started by covering the A3 page in charcoal and rubbing it down and then worked it up a lot darker than I usually would. this also led me to use putty for the highlights which I don’t tend to do much usually, I think it has quite a different feeling to it – the atmosphere is very different and it has a lot more depth than other charcoals of mine. I think it looks like a more competent drawing and I’m extremely pleased with it – it has a real body and weight to it which you don’t get so much of in a quick sketch.

I’m particularly interested in the intimacy between mother and child and for me the epitome of that is breastfeeding. I have recently stopped breastfeeding but had asked a friend to take some photos for me to work from during my course so have lots of material to work from! Not quite the same as working from life but that’s a bit of hard ask when it comes to babies. First I chose one of the compositions I thought would work best for a drawing and worked quickly in charcoal. Building on my work in the last part of the course I used some smudging and tried to focus in on the eye contact and repeated curves within the composition.

I love this, I think it might be hard for me to see these totally objectively but this is so emotive to me and whereas the previous drawings were fun doodles giving snapshots of our lives this is much more sensitively done and I think gives a real sense of that bond.

Next I wanted to build on the quick line sketches I’d done before but use a medium better suited to my style so I tried watercolour. I played around with one colour, two colours and multiple colours to see what different effect that had.

I was really pleased with all of these, quite an improvement in child features – these all look very much like Ottilie, recognisable of me too but then I’ve had rather a lot more practice there! The different colours all work nicely in different ways, the orange felt particularly appropriate because the potos were taken in an orange room and so everything tends to have an orange glow to it. Blue and orange is always such a fantastic combination, I’ve come out rather cartoonish in this but I like it a lot – we were in a moment of amusement between feeds and that energy is visible – the bold colour combination feels more appropriate for that than for a more tender composition.

I wanted to spend a little longer and try again with multiple colours – although the first attempt is the least clear of the drawings it has a lovely quality to it that I wanted to explore and build on. I still wanted it to be a quick line drawing though and avoided the temptation to build layers!

I think this was by far the most successful of the bunch. It has all the delight of the popping colours that I love but maintains that tenderness of the charcoal sketch. Partly it’s the choice of image but also adding a little tone adds a softness to it and minimal lines make it less cartoonish. I’m so pleased with this! I like too the watch – there’s something rather lovely about the contrast of the nudity with the practicality of the watch staying on, and of course time being such a feature in the subject – with babies every second brings a whole new era; this is a snapshot of a time already passed. It also looks the most like me of any of these including the charcoal.

My first step was to start getting used to drawing babies – I don’t really have any experience and the proportions are so different to adults I know they are very easy to get grotesquely wrong! I spent an evening doing quick line drawings from photographs of me and Ott together. I had in mind Matisse’s single line drawings where so much is conveyed so immediately and I know that sort of confident line comes after years of drawing so I set to it with repetition!

I like these – I tried to do them quickly and not worry too much and so although lots of individual bits are off the overall combination of shapes is very recognisably us.