Driftwood and an old tin

A page of my sketchbook. An old tin was sitting on my desk, open and filled with coloured inks. My favourite long driftwood stick and heavy round pebble were resting beside it. The bleedthrough of the colours from the other page, which matched the colours of the tin so exactly, was an accident and made me think of the blending together of objects, the relationship between the tree painted on the tin and the dry driftwood stick. The bleedthrough of the pen my sketch was drawn in drew a graphic shape on the next page that I wanted to play with.

I love the graphic shapes here, repeated with outlines blurred with water soluble crayons.

Next I drew the tin tree and the driftwood stick together as if one was thinking of another. I played with the two designs layered together, the driftwood and tree shape over the stick and stone design but felt it was too busy and its colours wrong somehow. So net I tried chopping out the pinkish driftwood shape. The muted colours of the photocopy I used and the white negative space left by the cut worked much better.

My favourite atttempt is this cut out shape formed by repeating the driftwood and tree shape and sticking the repeats down on a background. Before I coloured the shapes with crayons they looked very graphic. I was wanting to play with the idea of the stick shapes soaked int he colours of the tin but a different background paper would be more successful. I can imagine this forming the beginning of an appliqued cloth or a print.