"For Those Who Fly"

My second piece to be submitted to this competition focuses on "Fantasy" I knew that I wanted to produce something which incorporated wings, as well as being a much looser piece of work, since I spent much longer on the previous piece. I knew I wanted to use a mixture of inks, so I started by throwing some stuff out (even if some of it really was a mess) into my sketch book.

At first I played around with different types of wings because I was pretty unsure about the kind I wanted to produce for the submitted piece.

For these first few experiments I used a mixture of gouache and ink. After looking at these and getting further into experimenting, I decided that they looked a bit too precious and I wanted to go a little bit wilder with the ink.


 I carried out some research on bird wings, because I really liked the idea of creating the look of feathers, and the ink would allow me to create some quite heavy tones.

I knew that the main colours I wanted to use were blue and black, sticking with the original colour scheme of the emperor butterfly wings I had originally produced. This time I decided to try dragging the ink across the page with the end of a straw (my original plan being to blow it across, but it didn't look how I wanted it to) I literally just made blobs of ink and then started dragging them in the direction I wanted. I much preferred how these looked and I definitely was a lot less precious about these, but I thought they turned out to look much more effective. 

I wanted the wings themselves to be the main focus of the piece, so I drew the rough base of the body before hand, so I knew where I would be painting. 

I started by using black drawing ink and a straw to drag the colour upwards in the direction I wanted. After it had built up slightly I started gradually dragging in the blue. 

Change of plan

I noticed that the surface I was working on wasn't taking to the ink too well so I decided to stop, allow it to dry, and work into it further with a mixture of water colour, fine liner and pencil crayon. This added on some time however I was much happier with the result. 

Another thing I decided to add on was some watercolour to the background to it a bit more depth. I felt as though it all looked a but plain with just a white background. 

I'm glad I decided to put in some pencil crayon because this made it much easier to add lots of tone.

I was much happier with this after i'd spent some time tweaking little bits, to be honest I could have carried on but I had to stop at some point!