Ink and Texture

In the style of Thierry Despont

We had a task of studying Thierry Despont's use of colour, tone and texture, and were given different textures such as sand and cat litter to try and create a somewhat replica of Despont's work. In the very first picture on the far left, I started off by roughly applying white acrylic paint onto a piece of paper, and slowly adding a pinch of sand layer by layer. I then covered it in more white acrylic paint. You can see most of the sand on the first picture. The two other images are of the ink and paint that I used.

This was my first piece; it was very much trial and error as I had not done this before, thus I didn't know how the ink would dry or how the texture of the sand would look. I started off with the red ink, creating a base layer of a rose-flesh tint colour. I then started to add more red ink onto the piece, which added a deeper red to create depth. Lastly, I added yellow ink at the top of the paper to create some kind of light source, or light in general. I quickly realised however, that ink once it dries, does not keep the same glossy look and that it becomes quite bland and faded. These pictures above are before it dried, which is why the colours are so rich.

The pictures above are of my second piece, one that I was quite proud of. I felt like I had some kind of grip on how the sand, ink and white acrylic worked together, but felt like I needed to change the colours of the ink. Although the red and yellow ink worked well together, I felt like the green and the blue ink complimented each other a lot more. For this, I didn't really have a shape in mind; a lot of people were doing circles but I wanted to branch away from just doing that and instead focused on more abstract shapes. This above could almost be space, or the colour of a new galaxy. Thierry Despont doesn't work with a lot of blues or greens in his work, but I decided to try it anyway. I think this piece is definitely my favourite that I created. This was almost like a trial and error too as I used new colours.

These pictures are actually of the second piece I created, but instead of taking normal photos, I used an app on my phone called HUJI, which added a filter on top which really made the colours more strong and fluorescent. It also added a clear indication on the photo where the light source was coming from, which reminded me of what I was trying to create in my first piece. 

This was my third and final piece, in which instead of using sand I used cat litter. It was definitely harder at trying to get the cat litter to stick, no matter how many times I added another layer of white acrylic paint on top. It also seemed to clump together a lot more than the sand, which left some places with clumps of cat litter and other places completely bare. I went with the blue and green ink again as I thought it worked the best together and went with the original shape that I used in my first piece. This shape reminded me of the side of a planet, instead of the whole planet. It allowed me to focus on small areas a lot better. I layered the blue and green ink on top of each other to create depth and left some small places without ink so you could still see the white acrylic peeking through.