Little, little ink drawings

When I have some time to spare I like to create very small pieces, just to paint, without them being particularly well thought-out; often inspired by whatever media I am consuming at the time - in these pieces you will find a lot of GRIS inspired ones, for example. My go-to medium for them is ink, that I started using because of the Inktober challenge and have become rather comfortable with. To not overthink matters I tend to use leftover papers, not all of which are suited that well; these are torn from a colouring block that well-meaning people gave me for a birthday once. So most have a serrated edges from their perforation, some I cut to proper square format (don't you hate it when they give the paper format without the perforation, you think, 'nice, it's square', and then you tear them out of the spiral block and end up with a just-so-not-square-any more sheet? Maddening). At least there are many of them, I am still making my way through the second block; they buckled a lot under my very watery approach, so I eventually taped them face-down onto board and cut them off when they were dry to flatten them.

The rounded borders I create with circle rulers. The top left one uses leaf metal; second row middle has glow-in-the-dark paint on the moon, border, and moth; second row right has a border of washi tape, just like the samurai's clothing in third row left; the bottom row right one uses glitter. That tends to come off when the drawing is moved and ends up everywhere.

This set is from '21 and uses lettering rubber stamps and letter stencils to add little messages, something I have been doing for a while because I like the addition of something to think about to a simple image. They are all ink drawings with the exception of the top row right one, which is inks and water-soluble oil pastels of fairly low quality that I was given. Fun enough though. The samurai has an Alice in Wonderland quote and the middle one quotes Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

 

A set of very rough pieces created from leftovers of my pouring phase in summer '19; pourings are beautiful but waaay too abstract to be fun forever, and I have been using them as background or collage elements. These are drawn on playing cards - a good use for old sets, after all they are broken if even one cards is faulty - or snippets I used for pouring tests. All are collages from pencil or ink drawing on regular paper. It does add something extra to have such a lively background.

 

Lettering, or rather, messages are something I like using in small pieces - for larger, more complicated ones they seem too much - for which I use stencils and stamps, because frankly my handwriting is so awful I can barely read it myself. There is often a paragraph between two parts of the message. All of these are roughly postcard size except the found poetry one with the red umbrella.