Eithin

Green & bronze dragon 1

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 01:09:00 +0000

This is another version of the same dragon - I resized a cleaned-up version of the black & white outline I did, printed it out onto some parchment-textured paper I found in my stash, and then inked it. Literally inked, that is - the green & red are calligraphy ink, applied with a pen, but the bronze outlining is acrylic paint.

Red & gold dragon WIP

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:35:00 +0000

Apologies for the rather blurry picture - today is not a good camera day for me and the tail is just slightly too long for my scanner.

Photography - chromosome contrail

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:46:00 +0000

I was walking along Datchet High Street, under a flight path from Heathrow, and looked up to see this. I thought I hadn't got my camera up in time, but I just managed it.

Gandalf's Dragon - ink-only version

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:01:00 +0000

This is the first stage of an attempt to illustrate the firework dragon Gandalf conjures for Bilbo's Party at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. I was inspired by these posts on Tor.com, where Kate Nepveu is blogging her Lord of the Rings re-read. I'm going to colour it, but I wanted to post the black and white version first.

Falkiner's

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:21:00 +0000

Quick post to mention another good materials source.

Falkiner's (formally Shepherds Bookbinder Ltd) on Southampton Row (near Holborn) - specialist bookbinding supplies. Good paper in large quantities, thin leather of just about any description (including stingray, parrot fish, perch, and cane toad skins), and Useful Tools. They also sell good-quality lightfast pigment ink calligraphy pens, too.

They do leather scraps & offcuts at £3.50 for 100g, and they aren't stingy about what goes into the offcut box either - I picked up some very nice pieces.

High Cross 1

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:25:00 +0000

I had this one sitting on my worktable for quite a while, waiting for me to cut the block after I'd sketched it out, then waiting for me to finish it. After I'd done four prints from it (all that's printed, rather than painted or drawn, is the black outlining) it took me a while to work out just what I wanted to paint, and how I wanted to decorate it.

The colour panels are acrylic paint, the details over them done with calligraphy pens.

For sale, any reasonable offer considered.

Printmaking, or at least almost printmaking

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:26:00 +0000

Incidentally, I apologise for a lack of printmaking posts - I'm carving another complicated block, and it's taking ages. Mostly because it's horribly repetitive.

I've actually got a second - well, a sheet of carving vinyl - sitting ready-ish to be carved, but I've been debating over adding more detail to it and if so what. Thinking about it, I'm inclined to go ahead and cut it like this, with some fairly large open areas, rather than filling them in with knotwork. (It's a version of a Celtic high cross, or market cross.)

Rothko at the Tate Modern

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:27:00 +0000

This exhibition brings together a really quite extraordinary number of Rothko pieces, focusing on his late work and especially his series work.

I wrote about his Seagram murals here, and they really are incredibly absorbing. The proper way to study a Rothko is to get up as close as the gallery attendants will allow, and let it just soak into your hindbrain - or, to put it another way, let it hit you over the back of the head with art. You need to back off a bit from time to get some perspective, but the canvas is fundamentally Large and In Your Face. Interestingly, though, they work really well if you stand two feet in front of them and two feet to one side, and look at them basically corner-on. I worked this out by looking at the gallery lighting, and finding a spot where it didn't create glare on the surface - that's where it is.

The glare's useful, though, because a lot of his work relies on variations in texture and finish rather than on colour - his Black series, for instance, for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Looking at the paintings from odd angles, and letting the incident light from the gallery spots move over it, tells you a lot about the finishes and techniques he used. (They also have a series of UV photographs of portions of one painting, with blowups and indeed the painting itself for comparison. Seeing that many different views of the same item fascinates me.)

His paintings are often described as rectangles floating on rectangles, but that's not at all how he painted them - the "framing bars" are the topmost layer, not the rectangles themselves. So his deliberate topology is more complex than it looks, and the brushwork is also a lot more complex than it first appears - there are something like six or eight near-invisible layers in there. I'm also very fond of his edges - they're rough, thready, messy, but deliberate. It feels a lot like the deckle edge on paper, to me, and I love that, as I've mentioned before. He did do some with hard, geometrical edges, but only a few (the Black-form ones I mentioned, mostly), and they look really weird to me. Again, though, he painted the frame on the top layer, rather than the field - frames were extremely important to him. (To the extent that you couldn't possibly frame a Rothko - it would just look ridiculous.)

The frame thing shows up most strongly in his Brown and Gray series, where he was working on paper held down by tape along the edges. Over time, the edge defined where the tape was lifted off afterwards became a really important part of his artistic theory for those ones, and when he worked on his final series (Black on Gray), he actually created a solid hard-edged white border around the edges of the canvas.

I adore those; I could stand and stare at them for a week and a half. They're quite SFnal in a way, too - Rothko designed them with the dark half at the top, in order to make sure they weren't interpreted as landscapes. But it's almost impossible not to think of them as lunar landscapes. And after all, they were painted in 1969...

Knotwork, interlace, & illumination

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:41:00 +0000

Interlace art in sculpture (5Mb pdf)
Wikipedia on Insular art - the fusion of Viking/Celtic knotwork, Germanic animal-style, and Christianity. I need to try some of this.
Specifically, something like this...

Ink over acrylic, pt 3

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:00:00 +0000

Further to last, you won't be seeing a scan of the failed print after all - it occurred to me that I had some clay shaper tools lying around, and that they might work nicely for applying printer's ink by hand. It turns out that yes, they do, so I laid some of that over the outside frame and the central oval, and will leave the webwork light and ghostly.

This will make it take even longer to dry, of course, but never mind that.

Printing over acrylic, pt 2

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:31:00 +0000

It looks like the ink transfer from the block to the paper is much more sensitive to bumps in the paper surface than it is to the permeability or otherwise - I prepared a silver-blue background the other day, on black handmade paper with quite a rough texture, and even quite a thick layer of paint didn't smooth things out enough to get even a halfway useful ink transfer.

I did a print from my cartouche block onto it, and got very scrappy, patchy transfer - you can just about make out the design, but not much more. For comparison, I dropped a sheet of printer paper on the block afterwards, without re-inking it, and took a clear if very textured impression, so it obviously wasn't anything to do with the amount of ink on the block or what I was doing with the baren.

When it's dry (which will take a few more days, on an impermeable acrylic surface) I'll scan them both for comparison.

Trafalgar Square, redux

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 14:25:00 +0000

Further to my post on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, something else occurred to me when I walked past on my way from Waterloo to Charing Cross Road on Friday - having sculptures which are explicitly designed to be temporary means artists have a much wider choice of materials. Model for a Hotel 2007 is made from coloured glass (the artist wanted Perspex; it proved technically impossible) and it must be quite a nightmare to maintain, to keep looking nice. Having to do that more or less forever is a daunting prospect.

Also, the proposed Gormley sculpture would be even less feasible.

Pentagram print, & failures

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:12:00 +0000

I did this last night, on some faux-parchment paper I had lying around. It's done with Japanese carving vinyl, and I'm quite pleased with the way most of it turned out - the four styles of interlocking lines distinguish themselves nicely, and I managed to get cutlines where I wanted them and not where I didn't. (Cutlines - the traces from clearing vinyl from the blank areas, rather than the relief outline forming the main design.)

However, I managed to do something bloody stupid, which is that I forgot completely that the design would be mirrored. Normally it doesn't matter with my work, but this particular one completely fails to work when the pattern goes anticlockwise instead of clockwise.

Here's a version flipped sideways in the Gimp, to show how it would have worked if it had, you know, worked at all.

I did half a dozen prints onto different papers, and learnt one other thing doing this - the flower petal inclusions in the nice handmade paper aren't very firmly included.

And nightingales sang in Trafalgar Square

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:29:00 +0000

More from the Guardian - something else to disagree with from Jonathan Jones, in fact.

Trafalgar Square is one of London's noisy, dirty, congested, wonderful hearts, and there are four plinths surrounding Nelson's Column. Three are surmounted by statues of a king (George IV) and two generals (Henry Havelock and Sir Charles James Napier), and the fourth hosts a rotating series of modern art commissions. The original intention was to put up a statue of William IV, but that failed (no money, the besetting curse of art projects) and then nobody could agree which monarch or militarist deserved the honour most.

Jones has promoted a fun new conspiracy theory - the only reason the fourth plinth hasn't been permanently occupied is because dear old Lizzie hasn't popped her clogs yet, and they're Secretly Planning an equestrian statue of her for it. It's total bollocks, of course, but it would actually be quite a nice idea - an equestrian statue of a queen who was never an empress or a militarist.

There's nothing wrong with representative sculpture, and we can't deny people like looking at it - I'm extremely fond of statues of horses myself, even if they have people sitting on them. And just because the poor dear is a queen doesn't mean we should be prejudiced against representations of her. Besides, Jones's alternative proposal is to commission a permanent modern art piece for the plinth, and I rather feel this is missing the point - having pieces displayed for a while is fairly normal in most contexts, and doesn't make them any less worthy than putting one up there permanently.

The point and purpose of Art isn't to be shown off, or for the Establishment to demonstrate how good and modern it is; it's so people can see it. Think of the Fourth Plinth as a taster exhibition.

Personally, I think we should use all four for this - put the poor old king and his generals out to grass, send them off elsewhere. There's plenty of precedent - a statue of Gordon of Khartoum was put up in 1888, and moved elsewhere in 1943. If you can swap Gordon of Khartoum out, you can do it to any militarist you like.

Science & art, again

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:00:00 +0000

I've finally got around to reading through the backlog of Guardian arts column articles I had piled up, so here's some more commentary for you! This is another by the usually-reliable Jonathan Jones - reliable in that he's almost always flat-out wrong.

He's terribly disappointed in the limited scope and basic crapness of the artists, but to me they all look really interesting - especially Richard Woods, but then I'm rather a sucker for printing techniques overall.

I wish I'd managed to see the exhibition myself, but that's timing for you. I'm rather looking forward to seeing the final result, by Tania Kovats.

I think, personally, that Jones is looking at an overly narrow interpretation of Darwin's ideas, and that "art inspired by Science" must necessarily be about Science. Kovats is primarily a landscape artist, rooted very firmly in the same cultural soil as Darwin was, although it's evolved and enrichened itself over time, and she's chosen to focus as much on that soil - the archaeological context for Darwin's work - as on the strict scientific themes. For something that is going to become part of the fabric of a museum (the closest thing to a permanent context there is) that's an ideal choice.

Mixed-media Lammas print

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:04:00 +0000

After this, I decided to try printing onto an acrylic-painted surface. It turns out that it works rather well, but takes quite a bit longer to dry - I suspect I can generalize from that to say that the drying time depends on the absorbency of the paper beneath.

Here is the result, which is now framed and hanging on my kitchen wall. (Mounted in a simple A4 clip frame, with a sheet of neutral-grey acid free paper between it and the mankboard backing.)

I don't feel I can sell high-days prints, but I'm happy to give prints from this block away to good homes.

GIMP

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:13:00 +0000

I've been using the GIMP for quite a while, so I was rather interested to see this review from Dave at Scriptorium.

As far as free software goes (in the FOSS sense, rather than the strictly literal send-no-money-now sense), the GIMP is pretty damn good. However, as free software tends to be, it's designed (in the usual loose sense of 'designed') by programmers and ideologues rather than by domain experts. It's extremely good for just about any casual purpose, eg. web graphics or home inkjet work, but just doesn't have the tools for pre-press or professional design work.

Folksy

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:22:00 +0000

Folksy is apparently advertised as pretty much an alternative (and UK-based) version of Etsy, which I've looked into in the past and not had enough energy to set up and try out.

Since they're in beta, though (but still open for sales & functionality), and I have a weakness for prodding websites till they break, I set up a shop there. It's here. So far all I've put up there is a couple of prints, but I'm going to add some other things soon when I have samples - I've been working on belt buckles recently, having found some good lightweight blank plate buckles at JT Batchelor's in Islington last week.

So, basically, yes, there is Stuff on sale, and (if I say so myself) at very reasonable prices. I'm also delighted to take on commissions.

Pewter-grey ribbon choker

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:20:00 +0000

This is something I made for Elly, which she's quite pleased with. It's made from 10mm double-satin ribbon, fastened at the back with a tiny buckle, and the eyelets for the tongue are just punched through and edged with varnish for strength. (Mind you, I need to redo them, because this was a bit of an experiment and I've found a better method - acrylic paint then varnish) as a result.

Photos by Nick Metcalfe. All rights reserved.

New GoodnessDirect logo

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:01:00 +0000

GoodnessDirect logo
Originally uploaded by Justin Fleming

Goodness Direct have decided to change their logo, and they're asking for consultation. Here's the proposed new version.

It bothers me a lot - garish and plain at the same time, with an odd variant of CMYK without the K. Green: the new black? That's an interesting idea, but I don't think it goes anywhere. Those shapes look like children's sweets, packed full of artificial colours and flavourings.

Mind you, the text portion I like - it manages to be solid & reliable, while still looking modern.

Om be praised!

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:12:00 +0000

A friend asked me recently to do some concept artwork for the Church of Om, before a service to be given at the Discworld Convention - specifically, a vaguely Buddhist-style mandala. Here's the result.

Photo taken by Nick Metcalfe. All rights reserved.

Skin Coloured

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:40:00 +0000

Skin Coloured is "intended to be a collaborative, visual exploration of what it is to be non-white in a white culture." I'm white myself (dark skinned, but unmistakably white), but this issue fascinates me. Racism, art & design, and usability issues all rolled into one.

They're looking for more pictures with examples, so please do drop them a line if you have any.

Lammas prints

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 13:24:00 +0000

Yesterday was Lammas, or Lughnasadh if you prefer. It's mostly an agrarian holyday, but I was brought up a pastoralist (Welsh hill farming isn't really so concerned about the grain harvests) so the only aspect that really speaks to me is the sunlight. I started carving the block as the sunlight faded, and was printing these over midnight.

Linocut on smooth white drawing paper, and on blue rough-weave handmade paper.

This to That - glues

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 17:17:00 +0000

Which glue to use is always a tricky problem. This to That will not only tell you which one works for a particular purpose, but why, and how to use it.

It's US-centric, but a lot of products cross over, and a bit of poking around will always find you a UK equivalent.

Piet Mondrian

noreply@blogger.com (Sam) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:37:00 +0000

Generally, when we think of Mondrian, we think of something like this -

(Rhythm of Black Lines, c. 1935-42)

I'd had absolutely no idea that his early work was so different, and yet so similar. If you look at the brushwork and the patterns in this one (Gray Tree, 1911) -

- then there are very definitely similarities there. I'm yearning to go and look at his work in the flesh, or at least the canvas, now. Artchive has a really interesting essay on his work, explaining the progression. I love the image of artist as technocrat, and it's very much of his age.