The main thing I did for Artober today was doodling a page in my current watercolor sketchbook. My inspiration for this page was this video by Terry Runyan. I decided to make mine October-ish with some pumpkins (and an owl and some rats), but you’ll definitely see where I borrowed ideas/dogs/birds/poses from the original piece.
I hope to paint it in tomorrow or the next day—probably nothing too fancy, but just something fun and simple. I think I’d like to doodle a page like this again, sometime.
I had more free time today, so I spent some of it playing with the gel plate. A little acrylic paint, some textures, paper to print on, and you just see what you end up with.
The one on the left is a “found texture”—a cheap plastic placemat bought at “The Bins” (Goodwill).
On the right is the plastic mesh that some onions were sold in.
This is a stencil from a multi-pack I bought. The faint lines come from a piece of cardboard with the smooth paper torn off one side.
The colors on this one feel a little gruesome… It’s the onion bag again, on top of a page of random doodles from when I was trying out a fountain pen for the first time. They weren’t very good doodles, but they add just a hint of interest through the paint.
I picked some weeds from the backyard to try gel printing with. I think my favorite was the one on the left. I don’t know what that weed even is, but I like how it printed! I also like how a few dots of green paint left on the plate from a previous print was pulled up on the pink/maroon one. These kinds of unpredictable “happy accidents” are what make gel printing so much fun.
A little of the charcoal (from earlier in the month) was still on the gel plate when I pulled the print on the right. You can just barely make it out.
(I did use some mineral oil to clean the charcoal residue from the other, larger gel plate, and it worked perfectly.)
I’ve made gel prints from ferns before that captured great detail. I’m not sure why the ones I tried today didn’t work as well, but they’re still interesting in their own way.
And here’s one more with the unknown weed that I liked (and also more of the charcoal from the plate that I hadn’t cleaned yet).
