Art inspiration is everywhere…

Music credit: Supine, Peter Sandberg

This week, I walked to the train station. Nothing remarkable. Just the usual fifteen-minute route through the centre of town. But instead of rushing I slowed down. On purpose.

I set myself a small task: Notice what catches your eye. Not the big, obvious things, but the tiny, hidden interesting shapes and patterns, motifs and moments.

I paid attention to the shadows cast by railings. The silhouette of a plants against a clear sky. Stripes of fencing, angular and imperfect.

Noticing became a kind of tuning fork, helping me tune back into my own visual sensitivities. That part of me that’s sensitive to shape and pattern. Line and contrast. Colour and texture.

I paused often.

Not to capture the perfect photo, to simply notice. And as I looked, I found more.

More shapes. More visual whispers that I’d perhaps normally pass by.

It reminded me that inspiration doesn’t shout. It waits for us to seek it out, to pay close attention, to slow down enough to notice it…

This kind of wandering and wondering is one of the easiest creative practices I know. A way to gather and reflect. Because inspiration doesn’t always come from grand views or planned studio time.

Sometimes it starts in the space between errands, on a Friday morning. Walking through the centre of town, looking and really seeing.

If you try it, you might be surprised by what reveals itself.

Materials

Here are some of the materials I was using in this video:

• The paper I am using is mostly Academia Paper from Fabriano

• The large A3 sketchbook is from a British brand called Daler Rowney

• The small sketchbook is a Venezia Book from Fabriano

• The black brush pen I am using is a Pentel pen similar to this one

• The glue I am using was Liquitex Matt Gel Medium

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Monochrome magic

This video is one from my vault and was filmed in 2022.

Simple and striking

Colour is fascinating in all its sumptuous and seductive hues, but I am also very attracted to the simplicity and strikingness of black and white. In this post I share a few thoughts about working in black and white and a few of my favourite art materials.

Contrast and composition

The black and white palette is the most high contrast one there is, the lightest of lights and the darkest of darks. And as contrast and difference are what can make an artwork feel interesting, black and white can be a powerful and bold combination.

When using just black and white the composition of an artwork becomes more obvious, there is no colour to hide behind and this can be quite helpful in seeing how shapes, lines and all the constituent parts interact.

It pares everything back to its bones and I enjoy the elemental nature of this…when working in colour there are so many decisions to make, just using a few black pens takes away a lot these decisions.

Sometimes colour can obscure what is happening with a composition, in black and white the composition becomes extremely obvious.

The materials

Here is a run down of some of the materials I use, they’re just the ones I like, but I often get asked about which pens I use, so here they are:

BLACK PENS

• Pigma Micron Fine liner Pen for fine lines

• Pentel Pocket Re-fillable Brush Pen (this is the pen I use for the large sections of black, it is refillable with cartridges)

WHITE PENS

I can’t whole-heaertedly recommend any white pen, in my experience they are all often a little difficult. I often revert to a dip pen and a small pot of white ink.

• Molotow One4all white acrylic pen

• Sakura Gelly Roll 10

• Uni Posca Marker Pen Fine

• Uni Ball Signo Broad

I’m also just trying out some Zig pens from a brand called Kuretake which have had good reviews and I will let you know how they pan out…

OTHER MATERIALS

I often use black Indian Ink from Jackson’s Art and stick in pieces of photocopy with matt medium or a glue stick.

SKETCHBOOK

The sketchbook I use here is called the Venezia Book from Fabriano which comes in several sizes and has 200gsm paper and 48 sheets or 96 page surfaces. I mostly use the largest one which is 23cm x 30cm as it can take quite a bit of wet material and collage and the double page spreads in this size book lay quite flat…

Constraints

The limitation of using just a few pens and a limited choice of black and white quite liberating. Sometimes constraints can be, paradoxically, very freeing in art making, they can make it easier to start and cut down the decisions needed when infinite possibilities lead to option paralysis…

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