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Last week, I spent a pleasant evening with the husband doing some wood carving. We took turns to carve a wooden branch, though we had no real plans for what we wanted to carve — a spoon? a fork? a small figure? We just wanted to feel the carving knife slicing into the soft wood. Or at least I did! The husband was more interested in seeing how easy or difficult this particular wood species was to carve, as he starts to prepare for the spoon carving workshops that he hosts in winter.
Somewhere along the way, we decided to turn that branch into a texture tool that I could use when I paint. One end turned into a 2-tined fork, and I smoothed the other end at a diagonal angle, making sure to keep the natural split in the branch intact. I couldn’t wait to see what kinds of marks I could get with this little texture tool!
I decided to experiment with Winsor & Newton’s black India ink — you can see the results of my experiments {and a bit of the carving process} in the video above.
I also did some mark making in one of my accordion journals {pictured above}, which morphed into the piece you see below rather quickly. All it took was finding faces in the marks, dropping some blue fountain pen ink onto the page, and then working on refining the faces.
I tried adding some Sennelier ink using the texture tool, but that didn’t work as well as the India ink. I guess it has something to do with the texture of the inks — more experimenting is in order!
To finish up the page, I added some more fountain pen ink along with a hint of grey acrylic ink, and included some lyrics from King by Florence and the Machine.
I love the rawness of all scribble lines, and the witchy feeling that this page evokes; perfect for this month’s creative exploration!
An invitation for you: Look around the house for things that you can use to create texture in your work, and make your own texture tools! Some ideas to get you started:
Bunch up a few earbuds and use them to make marks
Tie a small bunch of toothpicks together and see what kinds of marks you can make
Use branches or stems as mark making tools
Tie some pieces of string to a dowel and use it to make marks on your page
Share your ideas for interesting and unusual texture tools in the comments!
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