Tree Love

I took a tree theme for this year’s inktober, although I didn’t manage an ink drawing every day. For the first time, I did the ink drawings without sketching in pencil first.

 

If you’d like to join me in supporting The Woodland Trust, visit https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/ 

Inktober

Inktober is an online October event, the rules are simple – draw something in ink every day and post it. As I’d never drawn in ink, I took the alternative of pencilling first – which isn’t cheating. I didn’t manage every day either because I was ill towards the end of the month, but I got enough inks to feel like I did something, and it has had an impact on my drawing. The groups I drew at the end of the month I would never have considered trying at the beginning.

I picked birds as my theme because I wanted to work on my nature drawing, and I wasn’t very confident about birds, and capturing feathers on paper when I started.

Here’s a little video of all the birds.

The tunes in the background are also bird related and traditional. All of them are the tunes for songs – Lark in the clear air, The Nightingale (which my grandmother used to sing) and Twa Corbies (crows). All played by me, on a descant recorder. That was my first instrument, I lied about my age to get into recorder club – for five year olds and up. Start as you mean to go on….

Inktober

I’ve decided to have a go at Inktober this year. The premise is simple – post one image a day for the whole month of October. The details are less simple.

There are four rules –

1) Make a drawing in ink (you can do a pencil under-drawing if you want).

2) Post it online

3) Hashtag it with #inktober and #inktober2017

4) Repeat

(Taken from the Inktober website – http://mrjakeparker.com/inktober – where there are lots of useful bits of information.)

You don’t have to post every day, but it’s rule number one that I’m eyeing nervously. I use pencils, paints and oil pastels for working on paper. I’ve never seriously used ink. Granted, ink can take many forms – it can mean pens, or ink washes or anything else inky, looking to see what’s been posted before. Ink though, is wholly unforgiving, you’ve got to put it down just right, it cannot be changed. Paint can be painted over, oil pastels can be lifted with a finger nail, pencils rub out.

I will be doing this in pencil, and going in with ink at the end. It will, if I’m being honest, be mostly about the pencil and then not trying to scare myself silly with the pens. There are prompts suggested on the site, but you can draw whatever you like, so, I’m drawing birds, because I thought that would be good for me.

If you want to watch me trying to do this, I’m @Nimue_B on Twitter.