Dr 1 – Warm up, temporary drawings.

This was a warm up exercise to move away from the concept of making permanent marks to form drawings, turning the idea on its head by and make non-permanent, or temporary drawings using unconventional methods and materials.

This was a great imaginative exercise and I found that one idea started leading to another as I started to experiment with novel mark making techniques.

Beginning in the kitchen offered me a range of different liquids of colour and density, so I first took a bowl of water and started to drop in some black ink from a paintbrush to see how the two liquids reacted.

From water and ink, I started to introduce sugar to thicken the water up, finding it suspended the ink for a longer time and at different levels depending how hard I dropped the ink in with a paint brush. After cleaning the bowl with washing up liquid there must have been a residue on the surface of the bowl as when I refilled it and tried the experiment again I found that the ink behaved differently, rushing outwards to the sides of the bowl. Realising that the soap broke down the film of the water I tried dipping in the ink, then some washing up liquid to see what happens.

This created patterns, rings and spirals that reacted to one another, moving outwards on the surface before sinking at different times. Intrigued, I started playing around with different paints, acrylic, watercolour and ink added to the water and see what patterns this would make.

Using pure acrylic and dropping water onto it made some striking colour contrasts.

I was interested in the fractal like organic swirl effects that I was getting from these liquids, quite mysterious and smokey, which led me onto thinking of other materials I could manipulate, and, being in the kitchen my attention was drawn to the oven. Wondering what I could melt to get more of these vibrant swirls I took some coloured wax crayons and glued them to a bowl lined with grease proof paper. Popping them in a pre-heated oven gave me some great effect as well as when they were cooling down.

I tried this first with a black, white, red, yellow, blue and green in a pre-heated oven: before controlling the ratios a bit with a large white, small black and a red in warm oven just to see what happened. The latter melted too slowly and ended up blending into itself, but the hot oven worked a treat, melting the wax quickly kept the sharp edges to the different colours.

Next I decided to fill some balloons up with paint and pop them onto white paper, hopefully capturing the exploding shape of the paint inside with a slow-mo camera.

This was a lot of fun and gave me some fascinating amorphic forms that ended up splattered around the garden and and a little bit on the paper I’d put underneath to capture the mess.

I tried other experiments such as rubbing charcoal onto a sheet of paper and placing it in the rain for 30 seconds, however the results weren’t too inspiring. I was aiming to get an image of the individual rain splashes some how so when I attempted it again in lighter rain, deciding to scrape some chalk pastel on the paper without rubbing it in I got much better results.

Leaving it in longer and longer the chalk started to mix itself to an interesting effect so I left it in the rain to a point, then let it dry to see what the results would be like after the rain. I then sprinkles the drying ‘picture’ with salt to see ther effects as the salt soaked up the colour.

Chalk pastel in the rain, dried and salt added.

All in all it was a great way to look into making different temporary marks in ways I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise and given me inspiration for some quick sketching exercises. with random shapes.

I also took a little inspiration from nature and snapped some natural patterns.