Expressive inky layers

I’m still here, working through the exercises in my expressive drawing course. Overall I’m still really enjoying it. The exercises are confirming my love for working in mixed media on paper, so much so that it might be another month or two before I go back to oil painting.

These first two images are experiments in creating narrative scenes. Using imagery from a variety of photographs, sketches, and previous exercises, I combined unrelated pictorial elements to make these scenes. I started with no particular themes or ideas, but as the images came together I found myself spontaneously thinking up narratives to go with them. I really liked this, and would like to incorporate it into future work. How delightful is the idea of a piece that inspires stories to be written in the viewer’s mind? Sounds like something to strive for in my art.

Below are six partial faces. I am so bad at knowing when to stop, and it’s twice as hard when the goal is to create an image that is incomplete. There’s something I like about each one of them, but they could all probably use another pass. Perhaps I’ll come back to them later.

All of these pieces are primarily ink and ink wash.