Studying Conch Shells To Inspire Black and White Abstract Drawings

If I am being totally honest I can not remember if I started to doodle and I said, hey this drawing looks like a Conch shell and I ran with it.  Or, I was studying the patterns and twists and turns of a Conch shell and incorporated these spirals and textures into my work.  Whichever way this drawing happened, it is a reminder how helpful it is to look at the world around you. You will find so many intrinsic marks. lines, shapes and patterns in nature that you can mimic in your own way in your abstract art. This drawing was done with a simple Uniball Vision black pen on a small white sketch pad. The drawing has a nice combination of darks and lights, a repetition of shapes spiral lines and a sense of three dimension or depth because of the way the lines were created. 

Visiting The Blog of Hannah Rebekah Straw: Making Marks in Black & White is Therapeutic

Hannah talks about how therapeutic it is to quiet the mind by using mark making with just black and white and leaving out color. Although I do not know what medium Hannah uses,  I  have spent many hours with a sketchpad and a Uni-ball Vision pen which is water and fade resistant) just mark making into the night. The beauty of the Uni-ball pen over the Sharpie pen is that it doesn't knock you over with a smell.  Hannah gets much more complex in her black and white drawings, using texture and different levels of pressure, movement and "exaggeration" of her marks. Take a look at her other B&W drawings https://hannahstraw1.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/mark-making-black-and-white/

Pouring, Drawing And Dribbling Black Ink Or Paint In Mixed Media Collage

 Drawing with permanent ink, especially black ink seems so scary for many people, cause it seems so , well you know....permanent!  The fear is that it might smudge, flow too heavy, take a wrong turn when applied etc. And those are all the reasons, I like "drawing with black ink" and adding ink to my Mixed Media collages. I find the process of "playing" with ink liberating. There are many ways to apply ink, sometimes I go for broke, and just pour the ink or black paint right on the paper holding the bottle up high and letting the ink land on the paper.  Oh yes sometimes "accidents" happen, and that is what  usually makes my pieces special.