Dot dot dot

I've had a week off since the office closed for the holidays, and it's been a huge novelty for me: eight whole days with few real demands on my time. This has been my chance to do something that often gets squished out of my hectic schedule: play. By this I mean play with different arty media, experiment, mess around for an hour here and there, without trying to cram as much of a project as possible into each day.

I must admit though that my "play" has been quite directed. I've been experimenting with different styles and different media for my Hamlet backgrounds. My initial idea was to paint large-ish canvases with acrylic paint and use them as backgrounds, but I've now tossed around other ideas involving watercolour, colour pencil, drawing in Photoshop, and finally, liquid acrylic inks. The backgrounds are looking far less realistic and much more textural and strange as I go along... and I'm enjoying the process immensely. I'm especially excited by the way little dots or other tiny patterns of colour seem to vibrate with vividness when placed next to other colours.

Here's a sketchbook sample done with Aquarell pencils (no water), inspired by pointillism:
When I tried to scan this, I discovered just how appallingly useless my scanner is - so this is a photo. Come new year, I'm getting a new whiz-bang replacement scanner (rubs hands like a fly).

And here's the thing I've been working on today - some little patterns in liquid acrylic ink. The brand isn't called Magic Color for nothing - it's brilliant stuff, and fantastically opaque.
The paler pink consists of hundreds (maybe thousands?) of tiny little concentric circles painted with a 0-size brush. Took me hours, and of course it is nowhere near finished yet. Ah, joy! Is it any wonder I have eyes like a tarsier?

As of 3 January we are off on holidays for a couple of weeks, so I probably won't blog again until later in January. Happy new year, all, and may 2008 bring you many vibrating colours!