Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Mark Making Tools

Prussia Cove
Mark Making Tools - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Acrylic Ink on Paper
34cm x 28cm (13.5" x 11")

The exercise for Lesson 24 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is to create your own mark making tools and explore the marks they make. I score an F for this one because I didn't read the instructions properly.  I missed a couple of critical points in Philip’s explanation:

• The exercise is about making pens - not brushes
• Philip used bamboo cut from the garden as handles for his home-made pens

I used fingers, sponges, old credit cards, bits of mount board, sticks, cotton buds and spray bottles to draw instead of making them into tools because I couldn't find anything to use as handles - even though Elaine and I have bamboo bushes in our garden - doh. Then I got carried away and treated this as a painting exercise because Phillips' home made tools look more like brushes than pens.

The Old Lodge
Mark Making Tools - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Acrylic Ink on Paper
35cm x 24.75cm (13.75" x 9.75")

Never mind, I can cope with the F, I was getting bored with monochrome and I still managed to learn a bit more about mark making.

Sandstone

Carved Limestone
Watercolour and Charcoal on Paper
23.0cm x 15cm (9" x 6")

Elaine is going to make this discarded piece of carved limestone into a lampstand. I painted it in response to the Sandstone section in Creating Textures in Pen & Ink with Watercolor by Claudia Nice. It may seem off topic, but some of Claudia’s examples look like limestone and I couldn’t find a good sandstone subject.

I drew it with the same charcoal pencil and drawing technique as I used in the Drawing Games exercise (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Drawing Games (Part 2)). Natural sponges helped to create the texture - they are becoming indispensable (see Volcanic Rock and Marble).

Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Brush Drawing

Parkmill Pond
Brush Drawing - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Indian Ink on Paper
26cm x 20cm (10.25" x 8")

Lesson 23 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about drawing with a brush. Philip points out

Whilst one tends to think about the brush as a painting tool, Cozens, Turner and Rubens all used ink to make tonal brush drawings of landscape. You are dealing with transparency and opacity, and depending on the medium, soluble or waterproof materials.

Mousehole Harbour
Brush Drawing - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Indian Ink on Paper
25.5cm x 18cm (10" x 7")

The lesson doesn't have a clearly defined exercise, but the spirit is captured by two sentences:

By working with a single colour and investigating the potential of each implement, looking at configuration and permutation, you will build up an understanding of each implement's potential.

Experiment with combining and opposing different qualities of mark and media to describe both the texture and tone of the objects and spaces in the landscape, as well as enhance your drawings, creating both space and dynamic tension.

I worked with Indian ink and a variety of brushes including the tatty old decorating brush favoured by John Lovett.

The results are reminiscent of my drawings from lesson 18 (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Wash Media). This isn't a surprise because, basically I've repeated the exercise, but with more focus on mark making.

Woodchester Park
Brush Drawing - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Indian Ink on Paper
22cm x 15.5cm (8.75" x 6.25")

The lesson clarifies my desire to improve the quality of the individual marks I make. The chapter on Mark Making provides a framework for continual thought and practice, rather than exercises for to do once and forget about.