CTI Senior College launches Inktober challenge
Kicking off Inktober students of the Art Metalwork class at CTI Senior College enjoyed a fascinating ink-making workshop with Annie Hogg in the College’s Barracks studios.
A native of Marlfield in Clonmel, Annie Hogg promised a day of alchemy in her ink-making workshop and the results were truly magical. Annie is an environmental artist and this year’s Artist in Residence at South Tipperary Art Centre, where her work will be on exhibition in the new year.
A graduate of CTI’s Art Portfolio course, she uses plants, soils, found lichens & bones to create inks and paints for her abstract artworks. Guided by Annie, students learned how to forage and source materials for inks from their gardens and the wild, in a way that respects the natural environment. Under her careful supervision these materials were transformed with water, heat, acids and alkalis into glorious colour palettes. During the workshop the students discovered how Annie had built a sustainable art practice that cares for and celebrates the incredible wealth and heritage of our native flora and fauna.
The prompt list for Inktober 2022 also reflects this natural theme: Using the 31 word list as inspiration, everyone is invited to participate in a worldwide challenge to draw every day for the month of October. This global initiative joins artists in a community with a single purpose and the results can be seen on the official Inktober site. Art students at CTI Senior College of Further Education joined the challenge: using traditional and contemporary drawing techniques to explore line, tone and texture.
https://www.instagram.com/inktober/
In the Art Portfolio & Fine Art classes are exploring the lighting technique of chiaroscuro. Adding to the challenge by drawing on dark surfaces with oil pastels and graphite, they have succeeded in capturing this spotlight effect in a series of keenly observed large-scale drawings.
Alongside this they made continuous line drawings of the same objects. This fun but intricate technique means they cannot lift their pens from the page once they begin, creating mesmerising patterns and shapes. Examples of which can also be seen on the college’s Instagram page (cticlonmel)
In the Fine Art class learners were creating some alchemy of their own using gum arabic to develop everyday photocopies into print plates. This process is also called paper lithography. They spent last week layering images and composing their designs before inking-up and printing some incredibly sophisticated lithographs. Illustrated below is some of the intriguing work of Bernard Prendergast.
CTI Senior College is also celebrating this October when our graduation night returns to the assembly hall in the Mall. This annual gathering was interrupted like so many other of our college’s community events but it is everyone’s favourite night of the college calendar when graduates don their caps and gowns and collect their awards. A special congratulations to all the 2022 graduates of the Art Metalwork, Jewellery Design, Art Portfolio and Fine Art courses.