Fancy a bacon sandwich?

I've been a busy beaver today. I started off taking advice from the lovely Linzie and the equally as lovely Ben, and made myself a load of scan-able textures. I've ended up with about 12 full sketchbook pages of really nice patterns, made even nicer by the fact the results are all happy accidents, like the marbling. A small selection:









You may be able to detect a slight printing theme. The top three are made with a roller and water-based printing ink. They are actually a nice Prussian blue, but I scanned them in greyscale to make things easier. I love the bottom one. The hump in the middle looks like a Japanese mountain overlooking a lake. The very bottom one was made by dabbing a small cork on a ink pad. I love the way each splodge is so individual, even though it comes from the same mould.

So, on from these lovelies, I tried applying them to my latest piggy ink sketch. Results thusly:







I think I'm getting somewhere. It's just a case of churning out as many variations as possible, I think. Working with a brush with the ink is really "free". I've just drawn the line straight off, and not worried too much about any details or being too precise. Drawing fairly large really helps too. You can get into the flow of the line much more, plus nice accidents happen with the thickness and weight of the line. Oooo, I'm all excited now! However, I really must go scrape all the ink off my desk.