Travels, Galaxies and Ants

Here’s a drawing I did a couple of months ago. I was playing with some Tooli Acrylic Markers that I had bought up at the Art Supply House in Durango. I’ve mostly been a colored-pencil-and-watercolor guy, so using acrylics was a whole new world to me. The colors were so saturated, so opaque!

Travels, Galaxies and Ant. Inspired by petroglyphs, social insects and images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Acrylic markers on toned paper.

Problem was, though – I couldn’t figure out how blend the pen colors, how to show a gradual transition from one color to another. Watercolors and gouache re-activate when you wet them, so you can mix the colors after you lay them down. Not so with acrylics. You’d need to mix the paints when they were wet, or figure out a way to paint a thinned paint over the base coat to get a glaze. And I’m not sure how to do either with markers.

What I eventually tried was dithering the pen marks. First putting down one color, then putting down dots of the color that I wanted to inter-grade. Changing the frequency of the lines and dots of the two colors so that, at a distance, the base color that the viewer saw was a proportional mix of the dots. Like pixels on a television – you (hopefully) don’t see the individual dots. Rather, your eye smooths the dots to produce a single coherent image.

That dithering sort-of worked, but it was a bit tedious. And I am embarrassed to admit how long it took me to figure out that I had reinvented pointillism. Also, the dots in my pictures looked like they came from a low resolution television set.

Then I saw some of the spectacular images coming out of the Hubble Space Telescope, especially “deep fields” images. The beauty, the immensity of what they captured in their images. It was astonishing.

I thought I’d try to make an image that captured something of the feeling I get when looking at their images, and try to come to terms with why I think their images are so affecting.

So – spirals, which I’m using to mean ‘a journey away from home’. Galaxies, for the immensity of the universe.

And an ant – signifying life. And the ant is recursively comprised of spirals and galaxies.

Anyway, I hope you guys get a kick out of it.