I think that January is the toughest month for me in terms of creativity. I get stuff done eventually but it’s harder to start than normal and harder to get going. I’m not sure why. It could be that winter has started and it’s cold outside or it could be that the end of the year holidays were such a disruption that I have to get the old habits going again. It could also be that January starts a new year and that’s when I contemplate what I want to get done in the coming year. Even if it’s all pie in the sky I still think about it a bit.
Of course I also tend to not take a holiday during the end of the year when it comes to my own creative stuff so I was working on things on New Year’s Eve day and on new Year’s Day. Not that I got a ton of stuff done on those days but I did get a couple of “Dreams of Things” drawing done.
One New Year’s Day tradition I have is to start a new Inkbook/Sketchbook. I’ve mentioned my Inkbooks before. They’re the ones I fill up with small ink drawings all year and then I will use those small ink drawings as my starting point for a lot of my work. Those inkbooks are where I work on a lot of my basic visual ideas. I randomly name them by closing my eyes and picking a word out of a dictionary. This year’s Inkbook is called “Paregoric” and is number 26. That means I’ve been filling up one of these a year for 25 years. That’s a long time.
One of the things I decided to do this week was to make some more ink textures to be scanned in and used digitally. Like a lot of artists I like sketchbooks and end up buying more of them than I need. So I usually have a handful of blank ones lying around. A few years ago I had a Strathmore multi media 5.5×8.5 inch one that I decided to use for making textures. Because it’s “Multimedia” it has thick paper that won’t buckle with a lot of ink and I can use both sides of the paper.
I ended up filling up that sketchbook (about 80 pages) with textures made from ink and I even filled up a second sketchbook the following year. So now I have about 160 textures scanned in and ready to go when I need them. I used them in the design for my “The Great Gatsby” illustrated book that I’ve been working on. I think this is the beginning of year three working on that Gatsby project.
So on Monday the 30th of December I decided to start working on textures in a new Strathmore multi media sketchbook. Something like that is more of a task than a creative endeavor and this is a time when I find it easier to get tasks done than to be creative. So I threw down an old towel on the surface of my drawing table and put the book on top of it. I’ve learned that when making these textures ink can fly around so it’s best to have a rag under the book rather than try and clean up later. There is also a lot of hand washing going on as the ink can get all over my hands.
The hardest part of making ink textures if thinking of different ways to make them. Especially after filling two books with textures already. I had gotten it in my head a few days earlier to try and use a dryer sheet to make a texture. A used dryer sheet has an interesting texture and maybe that would help. I dipped the dryer sheet in some ink and dabbed it on the paper. It was really tough to work with and mostly made a mess so I only got two pages out of the dryer sheet.
Trying not to make such a mess did lead me to using a sports card penny sleeve next. Those are the little bags that baseball cards slip into to protect them. I put my fingers into the bag, brushed ink onto the outside of the bag, and then touched the paper. This was less messy on my fingers but I was only so-so in making textures with the bag.
My most versatile tool for making these textures was a medium size bamboo brush. I could load the brush up with ink, smash the brush tip down on an ink stone, and then use the busted-up-many-tipped brush to dab different textures. Or I could spin the brush or drag it across the paper. There were a few different ways to use the brush. I also used it to put ink on different things like the dryer sheet and penny sleeve.
I could use the brush to fill up the whole book but I wanted more variety so I kept trying out new things. One of my favorite things turned out to be the round plastic container that Ice Breaker mints come in. For a couple of pages I brushed ink onto the lip of the circular container and used that like a stamp to leave ink on the page. I built up the texture over many stamps of the partial circle. I also put ink on the bottom of the container for a couple of pages of textures made from bigger circle parts. It’s kind of like drawing with coffee cup ring stains. Those ones were fun.
I also made some textures with actual stamps. Back in the 1990s I bought these stamps that were used with stamp pads. Two were of famous paintings and two were of textures. I brushed ink onto the stamps and used them over and over to fill a page with a texture. I used these in the previous two books but the textures are different every time so I used them again.
One of favorite tools this time around was the end of a piece of scrap wood. It was a four inch piece of one by two pine. I took the brush and brushed a lot of ink onto the one by two end. The end was pretty rough and absorbed a lot of ink. I then used that end as a rectangular stamp. It left some nice texture behind and I was able to fill about six pages that way. Some good textures.
It took about three days to fill the whole book. Just parts of days really. I would get something small and creative done in the morning and then I’d spend an hour or two working on the task of textures. I could put it down or pick it up at any time.
The final thing I had to do was to scan in the textures and set them up to be used. Photoshop and Illustrator actions help a lot with this next part. I scanned them in grayscale and then had to straighten and crop them. After that I copied them and turned the greyscale documents into bitmapped ones. Finally I image traced those bitmapped files into vector graphics in Adobe Illustrator. Then they were ready to use in three different formats.
Now I’m ready to go in 2025 with a whole bunch of new textures at the ready!