Inky Pleasures

Artistic 'Journey'

I started creating art about 15 years ago when I got a job working in a factory. Something about the job brought out a need to do something small and mindless to relax during time off and when I bought the book 'One Zentangle A Day' by Beckah Krahula I began a prolific period of doing dozens of small credit card sized pieces of artwork. This was really the thing that started me off creating art again. It's an excellent book - click this link if you're interested. I don't get any money for recommending it. Think Ebay or World of books might have it as well maybe cheaper.

This is a small selection of some of the better ones that I created around that time. All I did really was play around with my watercolour set then cut the sheet of paper into small manageable chunks and then doodled around the shapes using a fineliner pen and a white 'gelly roll' pen. Aye, it's like 'Paint by Numbers' but who cares... this sort of thing comes naturally to a lot of people. You're waiting on the phone, you've got a pen in your hand... you start to draw shapes and doodles without thinking! The amount of enjoyment I got from doing these (just for my own pleasure) you wouldn't believe. The moment I'd finished one I'd start another till I had done about a hundred....

Around this time I discovered a cheap and cheerful waterbrush - can't remember which one at the time but I currently use Caran D'ache waterbrushes which are far superior to any other I have used. I also had a wee trip into the toon to 'Details' Art shop and bought a tin of Inktense pencils which are pigmented ink and can be layered to create eye popping artwork. Combined with a waterbrush directly onto the pencil... absolutely stunning layered ink textures can be achieved. Here's a link to Derwent Inktense pencils - I wouldn't recommend rubbish to you. Again, I'm not making any money from any of these links - it's just so you can see what I'm talking about. Support your local art materials shop as much as you can - use it or lose it!

The Joy of Ink

I suppose all good things must come to an end, but in this case it didn't end it just morphed into something better than watercolours... acrylic ink!! I flipping love ink!! So, I bought a small set of daler acrylic inks and some cheap black ink and (to get over the fear of the blank page) started dripping it, blowing (using a straw), spraying with water to create blooms of colour. The amount of fun I had... ink should be illegal!! Haha!!

This has been a bit of a selection of my work.... apologies this website is all over the place! Who would have thought clicking the wrong button would duplicate every picture, then be unable to delete the copies! Haha!! All a learning curve I suppose.

These pictures are fairly low resolution - called 'webp' which allows the page to load fast, but I'll put my work into different sections so you can click a button to download a higher resolution image.