Trying new media

I think the most enjoyable mark making medium for me is ink from an ink pot. You can do so much with it. I dipped the end of a pen in it and used it to draw in a circular motion. I dipped a cotton bud into it and drew thick, pale lines with lots of the texture of the paper coming through. Then a hair grip went in, creating thin marks, deeper at one before the ink begins to run out. For some reason I thought of bamboo while doing this. Using green ink - I think it reminded me of the leaves. The end of a round pencil went in the ink too, producing deep spots of black, fading as the ink soaks into the paper. I tried to dab some ink through some medical gauze using a cotton bud, and it wasn't a very successful attempt (I was hoping to catch some of the hatched webbing of the fabric). It ended up looking a little like an animal print of some sort, like a leopard perhaps. But I didn't want to waste the ink-soaked gauze so I pressed that onto the paper, which left a great fibrous, cross hatched result. I know that water-based materials don't mix with oil-based, so I tried drawing lines with my dip pen across an area of almost solid oil pastel. You can see areas where the ink has not wanted to settle on the oil. Then I used a sponge, which again gave me a sort of animal print effect, all dotty and darker in some areas than others. If you got it right, it could be a really good stippling tool.
I used my mascara and brush, which was quite a nice textured mark, more rich where the brush touched the paper on first contact.
I turned a small piece of soft pastel onto its side and pulled it over the page. This picked up the texture of the paper really well. With two coloured soft pastels I used a tortillon to blend them into one another, which I have never used before. It worked pretty well.
I covered the next box completely with two colours of oil pastel, then used a hair grip to scrape lines into it. It was quite useful actually for pulling off the deeper colour. I think I prefer the oil pastels to the soft ones at the moment.
Next page; More ink examples. I tried to use a ink cartridge from a fountain pen to make some marks, and it burst in my hand! So, I did make some marks alright, be they rather messy ones. I blew over the deeper blobs of ink, in different directions, creating a sort of tree branch on my page. Because the little accident spread across to the next box, I continued with the ink and used a cotton bud to pull the darker puddles of ink across the box, which left a rather nice result. Very intense where the ink had landed, then quite streaky where I dragged the cotton bud. I tried another method with the oil and ink - smearing some petroleum jelly across the box, then drawing curved lines over the waxy parts. The lines are really broken up and not smooth like the normal effect of ink and pen. Then I put a metal button on a piece of string and dipped it into the ink, plopping it onto the paper and really liked that effect.
I used the corner of a credit card to scrape into another oil pastel box. It worked pretty well too but not as well as the hair grip, which is made of harder plastic so more resilient under my pressure.
With a pencil rubber I tried to lift off some of the colour of a soft pastel, which actually didn't work as well as I had expected - a putty rubber would definitely do a better job.
I rubbed over my Nectar card using first an oil pastel, then a soft pastel. The oil was much more effective. You can't see at all what I've tried to do with the soft one. Then I scraped a crochet needle in narrow, spiralling lines across some oil pastel - this looked pretty effective, and leaves a finer line than the hair grip.
I grabbed a couple of things from the garden for the last two boxes - a stone and a twig. The stone I tried to use over some soft pastel, but it ended up just tearing into the paper, so was not good at all. And lastly, I dipped the twig into some black ink and ran some lines over the paper. I remember thinking at the time that it reminded me of Japanese calligraphy.

So ink I believe to be hugely effective for deep, intense marks, be they lines, blobs or accidental spillages blown across the page. It is versatile in that you can dip anything into, or use any random thing to spread it across the paper. But it doesn't mix well at all with oily things - as I knew before doing the exercise but was curious to see what would happened.
Oil pastels are great too. They leave a thick, bold blanket of colour on your page, which you can then go over or scrape off to your hearts delight with whatever implement you can find - except water based mediums of course...
Soft pastels I find a little wet around the ears! They are good for simply adding colour to something and blending it in, but they are not hugely versatile in what you can do with them beyond that. Though they do pick up the paper texture nicely.

This was a really enjoyable exercise and a real eye opener to what you can use random household things to produce, and with what medium.