Category Archives: Pen and Ink

Fairytales – Briar Rose

Posted on by inkdropart
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I’m on holidays at the moment, this means my activities for the last week has largely consisted of meeting friends and family. When my time has not been spent catching up with people I have not seen in a long time, it’s been constructively spent following the sun’s march across the sky in order to get maximum exposure for minimum effort.

Into this action-packed schedule I have still managed to squeeze in a bit of reading. As some of you might remember, a while ago I decided to reread and try to paint some of the Brothers Grimm fairytales. Today, whilst gently swinging in the hammock, it was the story of Briar Rose that caught my attention. After I read it I decided to do a first rough.

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This will be developed into a proper painting when I get back to Ireland. It will hopefully be on display alongside Rapunzel and a couple of other bits and pieces at the Midleton food and drink festival in Midleton, Co. Cork on the 10th of September, but that is a completely different story.

For now let’s just remind ourselfs of the moral of Briar Rose story.

If you are a king throwing a party, with only twelve gold-plates and there are thirteen fairies in the kingdom, the sensible thing to do is to commission a thirteenth plate (or borrow of the neighbouring king, they are bound to have some). It is false economy to annoy a fairy in order to save on a gold-plate.

Shifting a full castles worth of briars and a century of accumulated dust must be a devil and will rack up the manhours something incredible.

Fairytales – Rapunzel

Posted on by inkdropart
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The other night I was sitting around doodling and it turned out to be Rapunzel in the tower. I thought it had potential so I coloured and inked it up. This prompted me to re-acquaint myself with the Grimm fairy-tales as well, I always liked them when I was growing up. It’s funny how some I seem to remember well, others are coming back to me as I’m reading and yet others I don’t remember at all.

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, so that I may climb the golden stair"

I’m interpreting the fact that I ended up drawing Rapunzel as a sign that fairy tales must be lurking in my subconsciousness waiting to pounce on an opportunity to emerge (any psychologists out there who want to give me a free diagnosis, feel free to do so). To accommodate the fairy tales (it always goes wrong when you try to deny these things, all the stories say so) I have decided to attempt to illustrate at least some of the brothers Grimm stories. Rapunzel was the first, hope you like her, others will hopefully follow soon.

Plunge into the unknown

Posted on by inkdropart
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This is the first post from Inkdropart.

A daunting task, to suddenly be expected to fill the white glaring screen with writing, not only once but over and over again. And the posts will not only deal with just anything, but something as personal as the things that inspire me and how that inspiration translates into my pottery and drawings.

The suspense is almost unbearable – will anyone love it, what if people loath it, or worst of all – it just leaves the reader indifferent? There have already been many a time I’ve changed my mind about doing a blog, arguments such as; “Why would people want to read anything of mine”, or “I can paint or do pottery I don’t know if I can write about it”, have been put forward, only to be met with equally strong counterarguments, both from the little inner voices in my head (we all have them admit it) and those wonderful people surrounding me. Those who think that what I create is actually something to hang on the wall. Literally in some cases.

So here goes, I’m plunging into the deep, unknown abyss that is called blogging. It’s worth a shot isn’t it, what’s the worst that could happen? Punctuation gone wild?

I suppose this is the time to introduce you to what I actually do. Well since I’m someone easily interested in many things I do a lot of stuff, whatever I fancy at the time really. But it does generally fall into three categories.

-Ink illustrations, reminiscent of archaeological technical finds drawings.

-Drawing and painting naive colourful drawings or painting portraits.

-Pottery.

Some of the illustrations and drawings are done by hand and some are digitally drawn, once again it really depends on my mood that day.

As time goes on I will post more info on individual pieces, but for now here are some quick examples:

This is a drawing of an Ogham stone made with pen and ink, the Ogham script has been embellished with gold leaf. The drawing is about 70cm in height.

My ink illustrations are mainly inspired by archaeology and are very reminiscent of what I draw in my day job – the main difference is the ones I do in my own time are done by hand, to a larger scale and sometimes embellished with gold leaf.

Drawing drawn by hand and digitally coloured. It's a whimsical, colourful fairy tale landscape.

If my pen and ink drawings seem more like technical drawings, my freehand is the opposite, whimsical and inspired by naive art, lots of colours and happy images, and oddly enough a dash of medieval illuminated manuscripts. This is where I go wild with colour.

This is a drawing of a Sophie and her doggie. It was completely finished digitally and then printed as a fine art print.

Portraits are a challenge as you want to translate the facial expressions accurately – that’s why they are so much fun.

Finally the pottery is mostly pre-cast shapes into which patterns are carved before the item is fired the first time. These patterns often turns out to be inspired by nature or patterns I’ve seen on archaeological remains.

This vase was inspired by frost on glass. The pattern was carved into the green-ware. Grey glazed was applied and wiped back to bring out the pattern.

I’m sure as time goes on I’ll be trying out more styles and techniques.

Hopefully I’ll be able to post about it and you will be interested in reading about them. If you have any comments I’d love to hear from you!