Description
This is Barry, he is my first ever full painting in ink. I have always been an artist using many different mediums through my life( Majoritively making jewelry under the name FwayLawn), however I avoided drawing and painting most of my life out of fear of not being good enough. So Barry really represents quite a colossal life journey. Barry took approximately a month to do, his actual size is A3 and he has been made using only ink, all textures and colours are created with multiple layers of different coloured inks to capture an otherworldly depth of colours. I have always had a fascination with ink as to me it has a purity because it has not been mixed with white. Using pure colours makes me feel more capable to getting a closer resemblance to my minds eye version of colours.
How did The Inked Octopus Garden begin?
A friend tagged me on facebook to look at this multicoloured ink, Jaques Herbin Emeraude de chivor. This ink has gold, green, turquoise and pink within its pigment spectrum. This ink really blew my mind, I have had multiple inks there for years but been too frightened to use them. So I thought I would buy this swanky expensive ink (It’s about £20 a bottle) when it arrived I was super excited. I got all my dip pens out, my paintbrushes, new sketchpads and started playing around on different textures. The very first thing I doodled was a squiggle that looked like an octopus. I was thinking about what to draw or paint and that squiggle answered my question.
So I started to investigate octopuses/octopi. It was all so exciting, I had no idea about them so I really was learning everything from scratch. I watched loads of documentaries, started reading books about them, found thousands of stunning photo’s of them on pinterest and the love affair was born. It very quickly gathered momentum into obsession territory. They are beautiful, intelligent, unusual, other worldly yet familiar, anti-social and not simultaneously and they utterly fascinate me.
So I started to doodle and paint with ink. Using a mixture of dip pens, brushes and all different types of normal fountain pen ink. I have still not experimented with alcohol inks- thats something for the future. Barry began to take shape. In the mean time I started visiting the Brighton sea-life centre to meet Pumpkin our resident octopus. She put on multiple displays whilst visiting her. One day I truly hope to meet one in the wild, I gotta learn to dive and become a confident swimmer first, but goals!!
All these octopus beginnings were about a year ago. So during lockdown a very dear friend was suggesting and impressing upon me how useful groups are and it was a good idea- to start putting your work out there. So one Saturday night I got brave, I posted a picture of Barry on Octonation the largest octopus group on facebook. The image went nuts immediately. It was so super exciting. I had never experienced anything like it. By the morning Barry had got 1.3k likes. It literally blew my mind on so many levels, because it was something I had drawn, people were actually liking it?and so many people too?(ok so I know it wasn’t quite break the internet territory- for me it felt like it had)
So from there many, many folks were asking about prints so I got straight in touch with a friend who is an illustrator and asked who replicated her images for her. This is when I found Jim Holden
https://www.jimholden.co.uk/ who is the photographer and print maker for all of my prints. This was the first and only journey out during lockdown, to speak to Jim about getting a print of Barry.
Jim’s photography is absolutely stunning and his reproduction of colours is literally second to none. The prints are fine art giclee prints. The inks are 12 colour pigment inks onto archival paper to create what is called a giclee print that is good for 100 years in the right conditions ie- not in direct sunlight etc etc.
The nitty Gritty:
From the point you order a print it will take approximately 3-7 days for Jim to do the print (dependant on how busy he is etc etc) Then it really depends on where you live..
America is taking between 8-13 days
Australia is approximatly the same 8-14 days
Europe is 5-8 days
Ireland is approximately the same as Europe.
These are all since the various problems with the Covid virus.
This particular listing is for an A3 print of Barry.
This is 297mm x 420mm or 11.7″ x 16.5″
This price is not inclusive of postage. Postage varies greatly especially with the art tubes. Uk is £14.62, Europe and Ireland is £15 and America is ranging from £19.80- £22.30 depending on how many prints travel in the same tube.
Also I make a charitable donation to Octonation every time I sell a print as they have been instrumental in encouraging me to get my work out there. So an average of approximatly 10 % is donated to their important research and education programs looking after and educating about octopuses accross the world.
The price includes: Printing costs, Tax, Tubes for postage, Stipe/Paypal creditcard costs and a small donation to octonation.
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