Ink - RETROSYMMETRY

NExt project

The portrait, the still life & the bedroom

Still life-ception

Lucinda & a cheeky tattoo

The first day after receiving the project, I took my girlfriend to get a tattoo, and being sat down for half an hour gave me the perfect opportunity to emulate my first artist- Lucinda Rogers.

I only had with me a set of fine liners, plus a single thick nib, I tried to encapsulate Lucinda’s use of perspective accentuated by her highlighted shapes.
I think this was a fairly successful experiment, but would prefer to use a brush nib for further varied line weight that would help imply even more perspective as the thicker lines come closer to the viewer.

Beasly & beards

While not a study, I’ve recently been delving into literature, and wanted to illustrate some characters who’ve been on my mind.
as I’d been seeing during my research that Aubrey Beardsley was also an illustrator of literature, I decided to take the opportunity to explore his style with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

I looked at Beardsley’s uses of dense black and his portraiture, trying to capture his unique style of contrast and framing using backing shadows. While I think this was achieved quite successfully, I don’t think I quite captured his more subtle line work as well, perhaps due to using a slightly cumbersome dip pen nib, as opposed to a subtle and flexible one that it looks like Beardsley has used.
overall however, I’m quite happy with my use of contrasting black spaces, and plan to incorporate it into my style further in the future.