Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Making a Mess

 

Messy Tree
Making a Mess - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Water-Soluble Graphite, Ink and Watercolour on Paper
18cm x 26cm (10" x 7")

Making a Mess is Lesson 20 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler

The instructions are to reach for any tool in your art bin and using scraps of paper, try to make a mess. Phillip urges us to be playful and to fill pages with as many different marks as we can without worrying about the results. 

I used a variety of tools - focussing on graphite and charcoal because I used ink for the grid exercise (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape - A Grid).

The biggest revelation was the fun you can have with water-soluble graphite. It lends itself to messiness and gets all over your hands. You can draw with it and then add water to create washes. I used a block called ArtGraf Tailor Shape. The manufacturer says:

Inspired by traditional tailor's chalk, ArtGraf Tailor Shape is a rich, water-soluble block of pigment. It is extremely soft and provides artists with a wide range of shades depending on the amount of water used, from light, transparent tones to deep, rich, opaque colours. When diluted, the Tailor's Shape acts similarly to an ink, it can also be used dry as a drawing medium by itself. It can be used as an entire block to draw or paint with or colour can be picked up from the block with a brush, similarly to how you would use traditional watercolour paint. (see https://www.viarco.pt/en/artgraf-products/).

I bought a block from Jacksons (see https://www.jacksonsart.com/viarco-artgraf-tailor-shape-watersoluble-black-carbon)

The picture at the top of the post is my favourite of the experiments and these are a few more from the pile.

This is the sort of exercise I need to incorporate into my regular practice. If I don’t feel like drawing, but I have a few minutes, I can experiment with mark making.