Dip pen drawings

I needed a different media to work with to get my brain going again and I really wanted to draw something I would be proud of rather than scrappy little drawings everywhere. I felt like my thoughts were fizzling out for this project, but working with dip pens and ink have helped me to keep progressing with it. This was the first drawing I did, I roughed out the idea in my sketchbook and then started working with the ink onto a blank piece of paper. I want to just get my ideas out so I didn't sketch it beforehand. The outcome of this was different to all of my roughs but still had the visual elements I wanted to include. 

I like how this drawing looks incomplete but at the same time, it seems finished as a composition. I don't like the placement of the keyhole, I'm not sure if this piece even needs the keyhole because its themes are based more around evil, death and poison. 

As I was thinking of ideas for these pieces I was looking through my sketchbook to incorporate things from a while ago, I am trying to pull all my information together now and start to think about my final outcomes. This piece is based on the theft of the pearls in Death on the Nile but in general it is about wanting to take from the wealthy and superior because this is a common theme through a lot of Christie's work. I put the hand in gloves because it made it more clear that this act was a crime. The dome on the queen chess piece is in the shape of a shell to suggest secrecy and hiding things. 

I took inspiration from A Murder is Announced for this drawing. I thought about the torch beam which lit up parts of the room when the main event of the book takes place. The revolver was the weapon used in this attack so I have used the shape of this to show the cut into the top of the bishop piece. I don't think this is very clear in all honesty, it might work better with another theme and an object that is longer and thinner. I suppose the bishop in this is Mrs Blacklock because she is the one keeping the secret (hence the keyhole), I have used the idea of the torch beam to make a spotlight over her to show that she is at the centre of the events. This reminded me of the layout of a stage and curtains closing so I added the wilting violets (a subtle clue to the crime in the book) falling down around the chess piece and lying on the floor. I thought this mimics what happens at the end of a show where flowers get thrown - I thought this was a good way of showing how her actions are all a performance in the story and her life is just an act as she is pretending to be her sister who died. 

This drawing is based around the themes of love in Christie's stories. I was particularly thinking of the secret marriage of Ralph Paton and his step father's parlourmaid, Ursula, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The wedding ring is a key object in this story but I used it in the image combined with the rose vines to give a sense of entrapment. I added the keyhole to the eye to suggest that there is something to hide. 

I got really into the zone when I was working on these and it just showed that I needed a change to kickstart this project again. I am proud of what I have managed to achieve with these in such a short amount of time and I think I'm getting closer to the concepts for my final prints. I like how I can relate these to specific storylines but also, the themes of them are actually broad enough to cover the themes of Christie's writing and her life experiences as a whole. I want to scan these images into photoshop and see what they would be like in different colours. I also want to take sections of these images and mono print them to see what they would look like using a different process which is more relevant to the print requirement of the brief.