A Little Bit of Chaos

.

This afternoon was fun!  A meetup up group met at a local brewhouse, art supplies and toys in hand, to do some art journaling.  I’ve never done any.  When I think of art journaling, Frieda Kahlo comes to mind – her journals are filled with words and pictures that swirl around and create a lively chaos of their own.  Not reading Spanish, I have no idea what they say – but words are not always necessary.

What does one use in art journaling?  It seems anything you want.  It’s a self-expressive medium.  So, I took a piece of tape and put it across the bottom of the page – you can see where it is.  Houses, baloons, a Ferris wheel.  From there, I added my own.  Is there any meaning?  Mayhap – no idea!  I can tell you that the tiny buildings made me want to create some disproportionately large things . . . and for some reason, the serpent showed up with his apple, alongside a few hands, a dead chicken, a mouse, and who knows what else.

It’s just fun to play!

Documentation

Over the past week, I have been fermenting iron gall ink. Today I decanted the mixture, and here is my first attempt using it. I used a quill pen I cut from a turkey feather, and a dip pen using a flex nib. The paper is a Clairefontaine notebook with very smooth paper.

I am documenting this historical moment with some documentation . . .

Iron Gall Ink – A Quick Update

I spent most of the day dyeing with indigo on yarn . . . and some silk. A long day! But, on the list of things to do was to decant the iron gall ink I have been making over the past week.

Success! It is a really beautiful ink! It flows well off the flex dip pen nib as well as the quill I cut a few days ago. I’ll blog a bit more about it later, as at the end of a long day, I’m really tired, but really content with both the dyeing and the ink.

Kingfisher (Drawn with Iron Gall Ink)

This morning I did a quick sketch of a kingfisher using iron gall ink using a dip pen.  As you can see, there is a bit better variability in lines than when drawing is done with a quill pen (see yesterday’s post).  Both have qualities I really like – expressiveness, boldness, delicacy.  As I am used to using fountain pens, a dip pen is no problem once I learned how to control the amount of ink on nib.  What must be remembered is how to load the nib, and as nibs are all different, a bit of testing on scratch paper helps.

At present, I am deciding if I want to colorize this drawing – which is why for now, it is not!  If I do, I want to use very dilute but vibrant colors.  It is my hope that the ink will shine through the paint without my having to re-ink parts of it.