Mark making breakthroughs! Outcome breakthroughs! It’s really exciting to do chaotic research and experimentation!
It’s all built on everything that came before as always. It is so weird because at the time it all feels so random but eventually it becomes something new and actually appealing to me 🙂 One of my first studies of Unit 4 was into a combination of Sara Ogilvie and paper cutting. I immediately knew this type of mark making wasn’t for me in its initial form – to keep the clean lines and flat, smooth shapes/ gradients that make up my favourite elements of the form I wasn’t able to sketch or draw on the paper at all which made the shapes more decisive but nowhere near as precise or calculated as I wanted.
Over the course of making The Distortion’s initial image, The Buried, and then Not Sasha I dabbled into more processes, notably texturing work with layers of PVA prints, coffee and acrylic paints; tracing paper, and printer-copying processes – methods of refining the technique into a way I enjoy more and which is more unique and synonymous with my aesthetic tastes of chaotic mark and painterly drawing. This then cumulated in my discovery of the way that print modifys the tint and tone of layered application in ways that can be used to modify as well as represent the copied item.
This technique, like my layering of inks, pens, and stencils for ‘The Distortion’ has parallels to the flattening of layers, lasso tools, and colour correction I use in my digital work and is pleasingly spontaneous and open to late onset transformation of the work, being so based on digital replication. It also allows for the work to be reused in different forms in different illustrations or reuse refined mark making if the piece needs to be adapted for example. This also makes the whole process less sacred again similar to sketching as it is possible to ‘continue from last save’ each time a new layer is added.

What separates this process from digital is the analogue aesthetic semi-effortlessly afforded compared to the silky smooth gradients of digital as well as the fact it can be transferred between both- gaining the textures of paint, print etc.