2 tone field drawings

Tonight I had a bit of a play with gel pens again. I love working with gel pens. The ink sits on the page like paint and comes out of the pen at a consistent thickness and tone making you have to draw in a certain way. My recent paintings have been very much influenced by working with gel pens, especially the vertical lined backgrounds.

Illustrators working with just black ink have to employ various techniques to build up tone, such as cross hatching, repeating straight lines, scribbling, repeating dots (stippling) or circles in a grid or isometric pattern or even more loosely and randomly.

I like to play around with these in more experimental ways. Changing the size and thickness and direction of these tonal marks can suggest form or distance. I have played around with this quite a lot.

I'm very interested in what happens when you use these marks which are used to create the illusion of tone in a more abstract way. For example, using these instead of colour in the instance of colour field painting:

  

Kenneth Noland: Drought

Mark Rothko: Black on Maroon

These "colour fields" could easily be "texture fields" or "tonal fields" or "pattern fields". It's something I plan to play around with over the coming weeks.

I did some rough freehand gel pen drawings this evening to try out some 2 tone textured field drawings. I also played with them in photoshop to try seeing how colour might interact with them in various ways.