Light Touches

Terry Pratchett said,

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”

This week my plan was to get started on the next of the larger canvases I have planned for the travelling light project but after a few days I had to abandon that (I may blog about that later, it might be useful to document failure as well as progress!).

So licking my wounds I turned to my sketchbook and had a play with the dip pens and nibs I mentioned in my last post (here). These sketches, rough as they are, are also part of the travelling light project and I will be scaling them up into large scale drawings with ink and charcoal next week. I am still struggling to create the impression of light movement in these sketchs; it was much easier with paint. I used masking fluid to create lines in the sketches but really they look like comic 'speed lines' and not really what I am trying to convey but I think when I scale up the masking fluid will work better, its hard to apply delicately on a smaller scale.

Ink is great. But, like water colour, it needs a delicate touch and the weakest of dilutions creates the greatest depth of field; something I am missing in these sketches, hence the Terry Pratchett quote.