After Getting to know your Art Supplies, we will start building a library of ideas by collecting marks. It'll be helpful to keep all this relevant research handy in our sketchbook.
But, before we start our collection, you must be asking...
What is mark-making?
It can be loose and gestural or controlled and neat. It can apply to any material used on any surface: paint on canvas, ink or pencil on paper, a scratched mark on plaster, a digital paint tool on a screen, a tattooed spot on the skin.
"Marks are the alphabet of visual arts." Those letters will form the words that make the prose for those who know how to read it. Mark is the foundation element that makes a drawing.
There is an infinite number of marks possibilities, and our terminology for them is limited - lines, dots, dashes, smudges, etc. It isn't easy to refer to specific effects and know what the term adequately communicates or its intended meaning.
Also, everybody makes their own unique set of patterns, and every medium has its remarkable quality of marking.
How we "read" and understand the meaning of a mark or collection of marks in a drawing and what constitutes a "good" or "better" mark is subjective and challenging to comprehend.
Why collecting them?
Artists use gestures to express their feelings and emotions in response to something seen or felt – or can use gestural qualities to create a purely abstract composition.
Become proficient in the use of marks shows technical and theoretical mastery of what we are doing, even if it is intuitive and challenging to explain. We can only excel in this alphabet if we are aware of the possibilities and use it in our daily art practice.
One of the best example to observe this technique is in Van Gogh`s drawings.
Let's start our collection of mark-making.
Start by using a graphite pencil, and at first, focus on getting different kinds of marks only.
After, when you feel that you have a good collection in quantity, diversity and quality, repeat changing material.s and tool.s.
Main mark-making techniques:
Stippling - Creating mark-making using small dots.
Hatching - Using parallel lines.
Cross-hatching: Using different sets of parallel lines that cross between them.
Stumbling - mark-making using curly lines.
Line patterns - are made up of small sections of parallel lines.
The closer/concentrated the marks are, the darker the value will be. If they are more dispersed/distant, the surface will look lighter. Check on the examples below.
Try to repeat the same marks using different materials like china ink, ecolines, watercolors, color pencils, oils pastels, coffee or whatever you have.
When using inks for mark-making, try different tools like brushes, branches, a fork, bamboo pen/straw, cardboard, tissue, etc.
During your collecting, fill several pages trying to display them in an organised and disorganised presentation being carefull on keeping an aesthetically cared-for result in both cases.
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ART HISTORY BRIEF CONTEXT from TATE's website.
The impressionists used mark-making – in the form of separate brush marks or dabs of paint – to add life, movement, and light to their paintings.
Later, the expressionist artists also created artworks using rough charcoal lines, marks, and smudges to suggest the movement.
One of the artists that better use this technique in a contemporary approach is Cy Twombly. He developed gestural mark-making into a form of personal handwriting. In his series of paintings based on the seasons, he uses this "handwriting" of marks to express his feelings on different seasons.
Artists also use expressive mark making to create purely abstract artworks which do not necessarily refer to anything in the real world but are intuitive or respond to a defined set of rules.
Action painters such as Jackson Pollock (who dripped and splashed paint onto his canvases) and Niki de Saint Phalle found a novel way of mark-making in her shooting pictures. Both explored marks, splashes, and drips in their artworks.
Automatism's surrealist doctrine significantly influenced this kind of improvised mark-making, which meant accessing ideas and imagery from the subconscious or unconscious mind like in Henry Michaud's experiments.
Mark-making can also be systematic and controlled. Eva Hesse created beautiful, serene drawings such as Untitled, 1967 by systematically filling in graph paper squares with tiny marks. Bernard Cohen'sCohen's work, such as In That Moment, 1965 is similar. A single unbroken line winds its way systematically over the canvas, crossing and re-crossing itself, only stopping when the whole surface is entire.
Well known for her repeated dot patterns, Yayoi Kusama is another artist who systematically mark-makes. She creates paintings, sculptures, and installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessive vision of endless dots. For her interactive Obliteration Room, an entirely monochrome living room is "obliterated" with multi-colored stickers, transformed from a blank canvas into an explosion of color, with thousands of spots stuck over every available surface.
By tagging or making everyday marks or images on surfaces in outdoor public spaces, graffiti artists also make mark-making. New York graffiti artist Keith Haring applied his characteristic symbols and decorations to the human body, as seen in this photograph of singer, actress, and model Grace Jones, taken by Robert Mapplethorpe.
Mark Bradford compares his process of making paintings using materials he finds in his local urban environment to "those tagged up, repainted, tagged up, sanded, and repainted walls you pass every day in the street."
Digital artists often create shapes or patterns that are produced automatically by programmed computer software. Artist Harold Cohen was an early pioneer of computer art, and the abstract forms of Untitled Computer Drawing, 1982 were created automatically by using such a program. More recently, artists have used data visualization programs to create digital images made up of marks and shapes generated automatically from a range of data. For The Dumpster, 2006 Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg plotted the romantic lives of teenagers through a dynamic visualization that draws its data from live blog entries.
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