The Documented Life Project’s theme continued to be doodles and this week’s prompts were to make a custom element and “Ride the energy of your own unique spirit”, attributed to Gabrielle Roth who I have never heard of I’m afraid. I do try to conform to the parameters of the prompts, to create a direct response to at least one of them, but this week I did go off piste a bit. Between my trip to New York City, Mr Pict being away in California and the kids being on Spring break, I just had to get cracking with a page regardless of not having had an idea emerge from reading the prompts.
I decided to ignore the quotation and, since I have somewhat exhausted my repertoire of doodles, I decided to interpret the idea of custom doodling a bit differently. I decided that custom doodling could be interpreted as very quick sketching as the mark making involved is somewhat akin to doodling. Since I had just returned from my trip to New York City where I saw the Statue of Liberty, I decided that Liberty would be the subject of my page. I could not sketch in the field, of course, but I did the next best thing which was to give myself a very short period of time in which to sketch out a study of Liberty from my photographs.
I started by getting some colour down onto my page which I did with two colours of Dylusions ink sprays. I then put down some very rough pencil lines just to help my placement of elements on the page. Then I got my India ink and dip pen out and gave myself just a couple of minutes to sketch Liberty’s head and hand clasping the torch. I then added some watercolour pencil for shading around the face and fingers. I am quite pleased with how the page turned out.
