Ink Drawings

Accidental ink bleed marks  

I am experimenting with drawing the imagined motion/path of people across George Square using ink. Initially I used felt pens on chromatography paper and tried dropping water onto the marks as I wanted to create the colour separation as the water disperses the ink. I accidentally came across the idea when I dropped water onto an inkjet printed image and when I turned over the paper, I noticed beautiful ink bleed forms. I have chosen chromatography paper for this purpose as its high absorption and capillary action draws and disperses the ink much faster than regular cartridge paper.

The effect of water droplets on the ink creates an organic and abstract form though beautiful, is not quite what I am after. I want to keep the integrity of the form circular.

Dropping the ink directly onto the paper gives a much better result. I particularly like the transparent overlay effect when one drop of ink overlays another drop. Also, using ink drops from a mixture of two different coloured inks creates a lovely 'halo' effect. 

I like the idea of the drops of ink representing the path of motion of people as this links into the idea of drawing motion as in Takehito Koganezawa's work. This idea of using traditional media with technology also references Camille Utterback's work Untitled 5 where the motion of people is translated as gestural, painterly marks in an interactive video projection.  This idea makes the work become a large-scale collaborative work with the pedestrians in George Square collaborating in creating a time-based, temporal ink drawing. 

Each time a person enters the video-tracked area, they are 'assigned' a coloured spot that leaves a trail of ink drops in the wake of their path. In the experiment above I envisaged the path of a person generating two drops as they move through a space (like footprints), but I suppose this could be just one drop. Depending of the viscocity of the ink and how much comes out of the dropper, a certain about of 'bleeding' occurs. However, using the ink neat (i.e. unmixed with water) gives a much 'better' spot. I like the idea that when two people stand close to each other for a certain duration, or when their paths cross, this can be registered by the blending of ink creating a new dual coloured 'haloed' spot. Standing in one spot creates an ink spot that grows (bleeds) with the duration of the static position.