Studio Practice: Playing With Ghosts

For literally the entirety of yesterday and the day before, I've just been using my sketchbook to play around with any ideas I had in my head or that were written on the feedback sheet from our group tutorial. Honesty I've had SO much fun doing this, just getting stuck into the subject of ghosts and using different materials instead of just sketching and fine liner. I'm finally starting to realise the value of letting the materials you're using dictate the theme of the images you make.

My hands hurt now.

But its been really worth it! The most successful experiments in my opinion have been the two studies of spooky places in York, done in watercolour pencil, ink and water. I think because I consciously was trying to make an effort to portray the moodiness and creepy feel these places have in real life, this is reflected in the images and they've turned out very different to the happy-go-lucky images I usually churn out.

I also really like the fine liner drawn images with ghostly shadows layered on top in charcoal. Again I think the reason for me favouring these is that they're such a far cry from my usual style and its pleasing for me to see that even if I'm not working in the style I'm comfortable working in, I can still make powerful pictures.

Next:
Next I seriously need to work out which route my works going to head down because I thought I wanted to make it really jovial and lighthearted but now I've trialled some different styles in my sketchbook, I think the darker style stuff has a bit more weight to it? I think the best course of action might be to mock up a few scenes in a comic style and a few in the more sinister one, then show them around to people to see which go down best?