Fine Art

New Art – Maelstrom

"Maelstrom", ink on paper, by Sidney Eileen
Maelstrom – ink on paper

Maelstrom

Roughly 3 feet by 4 ft in size, backed with black fabric
Bottle ink on large-format printer paper
~1 hour of work
No references

Large-format assignment for art class. The only requirement was that it be large, and she provided glossy printer paper for us to use. I cut a roughly 4 ft length from the roll, and worked on the non-glossy side. I attempted to use masking fluid on the glossy side, and it wouldn’t come off, which worked out just as well because all my classmates who used the glossy side had problems with the ink sloughing off.

With this large a piece of paper I knew I wanted to do a more abstracted style of art, because my normal detail work would require that I spend weeks of dedicated time to complete the piece.

The background is made with Higgins waterproof ink, dripped on the paper. I then dripped some water around it, soaked a paper towel, and spread the ink around. It took five or six applications to cover the entire paper.

The foreground is made with more of the Higgins ink, and with Bombay white (for the white bird). I drew the birds with the ink dropper, and then used a air can duster to spread and splatter the ink. It took hours to dry, and didn’t want to adhere terribly well to the surface. In particular, the white ink oozed out from the clean splatters within about ten minutes, so I only made one bird in white, rather than the half-and-half I had first intended upon. I think this technique will work much better on bristol paper, and I’d also like to try it on watercolor.