Thursday 12/11/20 - Ink Blots

I went into this wor

kshop with zero experience to ink blots, aside from my research on Victor Hugo I had never looked at this before. That's what lightly inspired me for this, I left a lot of my experimentation to chance. For my first ink blot painting I had zero thoughts as to what I expected for my outcome, I simply added different colours of ink starting with just blue before adding some yellow. One thing that surprised me was how easily the yellow and blue combined together, I expected the colours to more or less stay separated. In the end green and yellow were the most prominent colours and blue was the minority, opposite of how it started. I also experimented by making folds at different points to see how the shape changed. Unfortunately I discovered that doing this too much led to the shapes becoming messy and losing the nice designs.

The next one I added two things to help me, a paintbrush and masking tape. This was to help me to start to maniuplate the ink without just leaving it to gravity. In the end this piece took an interesting shape with a round sun-like object on one side, an oval of red on the other with lines of ink shooting out and two patches of blue on the sides. To add some familiarity, once again slightly influenced by Victor Hugo, to the piece I drew a very crude figure resembling a person. I felt like the image now looked like a very asbtract scene from a space film or something similar. I used the tape so I could add colours without them mixing and leave some areas untouched for some variation.

The last one took a different approach, I didn't use folding or leaving as much to chance. Instead I took inspiration from one of the initial concepts floating in my head from the mindmap and mood board. In yellow I used tape and the paintbrush to make a rectangle with yellow streaks and splatters coming off of it to simulate light rays in a very absract form. I then later decided to draw a person facing it, inspired by a few of the images I featured on the moodboard, I liked the idea of this. It represents the idea of obsession of something unobtainable, the altered state here is looking at the mind's inner state and insanity.

I also recorded a slow-motion video of ink being poured in water, I really liked the way it slowly flowed and spread throughout the water.

Personally I really like the last one the most, the one that left less to chance and instead created an abstract representation of one of my favourite ideas. The others felt like they were more messing around and didn't really help me with ideas for the project. Whilst the idea of ink drawings, especially Victor Hugo's, really interest me as a concept I don't feel they are something I could use in this aspect. At least not in terms of the rorschach bots. With some practice with drawing I think using Ink Drawings as concept design would be something I'd enjoy and find useful for projects and ideas generation, especially with very 'out there' work.