New project - Sketchbook pages

I have been making a start on the project I mentioned at the end of my last post. The images are chosen and the story mostly written, so I've been getting on with designing my cats. The idea is that I select eight pictures by artists who inspire me, weave them into a narrative, and reproduce them in my own style. My story does this by following two cats as they go on holiday to France to visit some cat friends. I will therefore be reproducing these esteemed works of art with stylised cats portrayed therein! Hence to design the cats.












So now to put them in the picture, so to speak!

Journal news

Since I last posted to this blog I have spent a lot of time not making art. However, I had a longstanding commitment with Maggie to produce a tutorial for her online magazine QuiltWOW, a quarterly magazine for quilters and fabric artists. By no stretch of the imagination could I describe myself as a quilter, and my dabblings in fabric art have been no more than dabblings, so I was very honoured to be asked. Fortunately for the subscribers Maggie was wise enough not to ask me for an article on anything pertaining to sewing, although sewing would certainly add something special to the project I have created. I can't say much about what that project is, except that it involves making a journal that engages all the senses. If you want to know more you'll have to wait for the December issue of QuiltWOW.

In other news - though, to be honest, there isn't much - I have rather belatedly enrolled on my course for the final year. This means that I have to get my act together and overcome my drawing block. The project that requires immediate attention, having been postponed for about 18 months, is called "A Plagiarist's Tale". I will say more about this in another post (provided all goes to plan!) but essentially it involves reproducing a number of works of art in my own style and incorporating them into a narrative. I am quite daunted by the prospect of returning to college and also the commitment I must make to producing art regularly again when I've done so little in the last 4 months. I have no idea whether I can do it, whether I can regain the necessary stamina, whether the notion that I can draw is any more than an illusion. All I can do is live each day with the aim to get through it and the intention to make art whenever I can. If I get an HND out of it, so much the better.

Maybe

Maybe I'm doing art again. I'm not very confident about it but for the first time in a couple of months there is something to scan and blog.

The last 6 weeks have been a complete write-off as far as art goes - well, as far as anything normal goes really. Terror, rage, hopelessness, futility, frustration, helplessness, violence, hatred and pain doesn't really cover it but it's as close as I can get. I didn't cut up all my artwork or burn my supplies but only by scrupulously banning myself from even opening the art room door. Nor did I do any obvious or direct harm to myself or anyone else. I listened to LOTS of talking books, stayed in, saw no one but the most insistent, and listened like hell to those talking books because the second they stopped, whenever I had to change a CD even, the terror, rage etc swamped me again. It was very hard to stay so still with all that energy surging through me but it seemed like the only way to survive.

Things are so much calmer, just the last few days. I hope it stays that way - until the next time.

Through all of that the idea of making art was totally abhorrant. I was to have been working on my body image project but I've done none of it, and still don't really want to. I feel that all the joy and positive energy that fuelled the project is dead and gone. Also I don't want to have to think about assignments, deadlines, assessments and so on. I should be returning to college in three weeks. I have no idea whether or not I will.

There is still so much anger that has nowhere to go, and that's what has got me arting again. I realised that, for me, the only feasible way to deal with it is to write and draw. There is no one available to receive the anger, no one to take responsibility for how things are. So I need to express it somehow else.

I am making a book. It is to be called The Little Angry Book of Heterodoxy. I have planned the illustrations, written the text, made and bound the book, all in the last 3 days. Whether it progresses any further I don't know. So I thought I'd post a bit of it while there's something to post, and to try to keep the momentum. Not much to see yet.

The inside cover and what will be the title page. Those ribbons are going to have a couple of tags attached.

There was a problem with the binding. All was well until I attached the cover, then, when it was too late to do much about it but abandon the whole thing and start again, the top stitching of the first signature gave way. When I turned to the offending section I found that some extraneous flecks of red paint had also made their way onto that page. I thought if I gave up on this book and had to start again it would never get made at all, so came up with the following solution:

Steristrips! It so happens that this particular spread can only be enhanced by wound closure. I have stitched a bit too - steristrips were never made with book binding in mind! I have to say, though, that paper is not as pliable as skin, so my wound closure expertise is not in evidence here.

The book is going to be a combination of text and drawings - monochrome pencil drawings with some addition of watercolour. I am not sure yet how to do the text. I keep looking at fonts to draw from, then looking at the 300 words I have to write and getting daunted. I am no calligrapher, that's for sure, and I can't stick my book through the printer either. I keep looking at Jan's use of text and wishing I could create something similar. Still thinking....

Nothing to show

Looking back at my last few posts it seems I haven't made art of any significance for about a month. I hadn't realised it had been that long. Here is why.

Firstly, I finished a major project and there always, for me, follows an interlude when I'm reviewing where I've got to and thinking and researching for the next project. The research involves thinking and reflecting on what I aim to achieve, looking at art by other people which is relevant to what I want to do, taking photos and messing about in PhotoShop with them, tidying up the chaos created by the previous project, and a bit of procrastinating while I summon up the confidence to move on. It seems to me that I can't actually draw, and that the drawings I appear to have done in the past must have come into being by some process that didn't involve me. I get scared to start a new set of drawings because I am just me, and the person who does the drawings may not come back.

Secondly my life got taken over by events. I went west for a wedding in North Wales, then became overwhelmed by the heat. A few days later I went south for a wedding in Basingstoke. I came back and the next day went to Scotland for a holiday with 8 members of my family. I took drawing materials with me but there was no time.

I had a great time and am so glad to have done all that, but since returning home I've become increasingly low and am finding it hard to do the basic tasks of daily living. Drawing comes a fair way higher up the list than basic, so none has been done. Today I started playing with the latest DSDF image and I hope I'll start on a drawing for it soon. I've made some starts on the last few themes but not got any of them finished in time for the deadline. I would like to achieve this one though as it will help with my people-drawing aim. But it's very hard to get underway.

So all in all I have nothing to show. I have plenty of ideas, imspiration, art made in my head. That is never the problem. The problem is the energy and focus needed to achieve the focussed concentration that drawing requires of me. Because it is partly true what I said about the drawing process being a separate entity. Not another person but another state of being. If I can't access that state then I can't draw.

Paper experiments

I have all but ground to a halt in this heat, and produced very little art of any description. I have, however, been experimenting with different kinds of paper to see how they accept coloured pencil. I have noticed over recent months that my way of using coloured pencil requires the building up of a number of layers, and that different papers respond differently to this. So I've made some samples to see what might be my ideal drawing surface.

The subject matter wasn't really important for this exercise, but in case you're interested, it's a small part of a boat.

As you can see, I concluded that I like paper with texture. It gives me more scope to build up layers because the paper has more vertical space, and it feels more accepting to me. Bristol board was my least favourite. If you want something ultra flat it's perfect, but I like something with more scope for mixing colours. Cartridge paper was OK, and I would be happy to use a heavy weight cartridge paper. The one I used was, I think, 120gsm, and that felt a bit flimsy given all the pressure I apply (remember my comment about being able to hear the pencil on paper when drawing?). I loved the bamboo paper and am longing to put it to use, but my pad is only just over A4 size and I need a bit more space for this project. I didn't much like drawing over watercolour. The pencils show up OK, which I wasn't sure they would, but it all looks a bit too murky for my purposes. The pencil also shows up well on coloured paper, which is useful to know, but again for future projects, not this one.

Drawing the same thing over and over again was tedious, and, in the spirit of scientific investigation, I felt that I ought to keep the image and colours fairly similar across the different surfaces, but it was well worth doing. I also noticed again that when I draw repetitively my drawings become a lot more stylised. My decorative tendencies creep in where I get tired of close observation. I quite like this tendency and it's another avenue that I think is worth pursuing. The only snag is that I need to drive myself a little mad to achieve it!

Way back when

In the last few days I've been sorting through some old stuff and I got diverted by the rediscovery of my GCSE art sketchbook. It is 19 years since I took my GCSEs so the drawings I'm showing you are probably 20 years old! It makes me feel very ancient to think of that!

This first one is s tree made out of scribbles, helpfully labelled "A tree" just in case there should be any doubt about it.

This one I rather like. It's a pencil drawing of an old coffee pot that belonged to my Mum. I wish I still had the pencil that drew it. It was s gorgeous thick and very soft dark brown one. I don't think I ever had any others like it. It reminds me that at that age I did quite a bit of drawing with eyeliner, but I don't think it was an eyeliner that I used for this.

This last one is evidence more of my talent for procrastination than art, because this is the cover of one of my Maths exercise books, covered in my rather meticulous doodling. The doodle gradually spread over a number of weeks, maybe even months, whenever the maths got a bit beyond its usual capacity to bore. But I wouldn't have done any of it when we were doing algebra because I liked algebra.


I still do this sort of doodling even now, and at one time I was commissioned by a number of people to make such doodles in the shapes of their favourite animals. I was actually offered money for them but never took it as it was at a time when I was in hospital for several months and my fellow patients had, like me, had their benefits drastically reduced as they are when you're in hospital more than 6 weeks, with absolutely no regard to the ongoing nature of rent and bills to be paid. So I gave away the doodle pictures because at the time it was about all I had to give.

Where I am and where I'm going

Firstly, here is the cover for my new sketchbook.

It is to be a loose-leaf sketchbook. I have worked in all manner of sketchbooks but never one that is in essence a ringbinder. I thought this would be a good way to be able to incorporate different kinds of paper, fabric, objects, without the endless cropping and sticking that I usually do. I've been printing things onto cartridge paper and hole-punching them. I've been hole-punching fabric. It's fun. I have good associations with ringbinders, all those years of school and college and university, making notes, writing essays, photocopying articles, hole-punching them all. I loved it. If I could make a living writing essays I'd be happy for the rest of my working life. So for all these reasons it's a ringbinder sketchbook.

So anyway, I've been having a bit of a look back and a look forward.







I ended up leaving my footprint prints at college this week so can't show them yet. I'll pick them up next week. But I aim to have some things to show for my new project before that.

The Shrine - at last!

This is it, deadline day, and the work is all in to be assessed. It didn't seem like a lot to represent a year's work, but given the circumstances I am glad to be able to feel that I have done the best I can. So this would be the last Walking Shrine post, if it wasn't for the fact that printmaking always runs a week behind schedule while the ink dries. So there will be a post about my footprint collagraph and then onto pastures new.

So I've been making this shrine for weeks on and off. It always takes me a long period of time to get this sort of thing made. Partly that's due to practical reasons - things need to dry for ages at a time. Also it's because the idea changes, adapts, along the way.

It's a walking boot shrine, the book from my previous post is there tucked into the boot. It's made from foam core board, polyfilla, maps and acrylics and wool tops and treasure gold and nightlights and glue and glue and glue.
Here's a side view. I like the texture on the outside almost more than the inside. Here's a detail.

Here you can see the book nestling in the boot, it's tied on with the lace, which also passes through all those tags I've attached. More setting of eyelets there!

Here they are in more detail. I wanted the lettering to match that in the book.

I have to say it's been a bit of a nightmare constructing this shrine, and it's not all that much like I envisioned it - originally it was going to have pyrography and people with halos. Most of the time I've been making it I've hated it, it seemed to be near impossible to make it come good. In the end I quite liked it, especially right at the end when I added the nightlights.

It's all about worship, in a secular way, to give worth and honour to the things I value. I can see from the comments that I have got this message across - just how important walking and my walking group, the countryside, the whole lot - is to me. So I am glad, glad for three reasons. Firstly, that the project is complete and I've done the best I can. Secondly, that my aims came to fruition, even if not quite how I planned them. Thirdly, that I have spent a fair bit of time telling people that my art doesn't tend to have a message, and I don't see why it should, and here I am proving myself wrong. :-)

Because We Can

On Derwent Edge in Derbyshire there are a number of monoliths which look at first glance like huge stacks of stones. They are in fact each of one form, carved by ancient glacial flows. They all have odd names like Breadcakes - the local term for bread rolls -, Salt and Pepper Pots, etc. I am not sure which one this is, the names seem to me to bear so little resemblance to the forms that I can never remember which is which.

Katy, like me, is visually impaired, with a similar degree of sight to mine. She sees a bit better at distance, I see a bit better close to. Neither of us do very well with depth of field - how steeply something slopes or how fast something is coming towards us. I thought this image of her standing on top of this structure, on top of a big hill, would form a powerful statement of what we do anyway, regardless of the limitations on our sight. That is why I've called it Because We Can.

It's pastel pencils and soft pastels on A2 paper. My whole house now seems to be covered in chalk dust of various colours! There is also a pervasive smell of fixative!

I am becoming less stressed as I get things finished. My shrine is still proving perplexing but I'll keep trying to make it into something I like. The deadline is Friday, then I can think about something else.

Walking Shrine - Altered Book

Here's a little altered book I've made for my walking shrine. As you can see it really is little, roughly 3"x4". I plan for it to nestle inside the walking boot in the shrine.

Here's a tour of the book. SVIWG stands for Sheffield Visually Impaired Walking Group.









As ever, Rosie is curious!


Now I just need to complete the shrine itself. It's at the polyfilla stage at the moment. I hope to be able to show you in the next few days.

Walking Collagraph

A few weeks ago I showed you this collagraph plate.


Now I'm back with some of the prints. I had to modify the plate a bit because some areas lacked definition due to everything being a bit too textured in the same way. The glossy paper, by the time it had been gel mediummed and shellacked, didn't repel the ink at all - so I scored back into and around that part with my drypoint tool. And the footprints were merging into the background so I sanded them back and re-shellacked them. I think I've invented at least two words in that paragraph!

Which brought me to here. I did a few like this, a few sepia too, and I decided I wanted more contrast still, so, once I'd done the whole intaglio process, I wiped out some areas with white spirit to remove the ink completely and got this.
Today I have finished a new collagraph plate, this time using Polyfilla. But I left it in the print room so can't show you yet. But it will be the last plate of my walking project...at last!

How to ruin a drawing


Start by using the wrong kind of paper. My inspired idea - which worked out great in my sketchbook - was to use water soluble marker pens to underpaint the drawing then work over with coloured pencil. It doesn't work on Bristol board, it's not absorbent so there was nowhere for the water to go and nothing blended.

Then use a really vibrant shade of green for the background in the belief that it will turn into a lovely soft green when blended, except it won't blend on Bristol board as stated above.

Do all the outlining of people before you're really sure which pen to use for it.

Make the dominant colour in the river the same as part of the foreground so that you end up scribbling over the whole lot in frustration.

Get to a reasonable point and then decide to put pen over pencil. Bad idea!

Believe that you can draw 2/3 of an A3 page of grass without going insane.


Apart from that, of course, it all went swimmingly! I found that, while in the beginning I was mostly focussed on the people, I became more and more preoccupied with the landscape, and the people became almost incidental. Just as well really because they didn't come out that well. After a frustrating day I am just glad this piece is finished and I can move on. And, as I said to my Dad, I probably would have been pleased with it a year ago, so not all bad.

Walking icon - mixed media boots

This new piece is an act of serendipity, well, a whole series of happy accidents actually.

The other day I was chatting with Lynda about printing on silk, and, as I needed to make some birthday cards, I decided to use some printable silk to make them. That only required me to use about a third of the sheet though, and as it doesn't come cheap I cast around for something to print on the rest of it. I digitally altered a walking boots painting which you can see here, and printed that on the remaining section of silk.

The result was a translucent image on fabric, so although I had increased the saturation quite a lot, it still had a faded look. Oddly, this is what I had intended! I started putting all sorts of paper and fabric behind it to see what effect the background could have on the image. The answer is infinite. I started to make connections, going back to my idea of shrine and icon, I thought how good it would be to have a gold background shimmering through the image, especially as it's such an earthy, grubby sort of image.

Pearlescent paper looked OK, gold patterned fabric was interesting and full of possibilities, shiny things like OHP transparencies gave a great wet look, but the best thing was foil, and best of all was crumpled foil. But I wanted it gold, not silver. A series of experiments ensued to see what would colour the foil most effectively. The answer, in my opinion, was alcohol inks. I went out to meet another Linda for coffee while it all dried.

Next the foil was stuck to card and the silk was stretched over the two and stuck down. How to finish the edges? My favourite way would be whip stitching them with embroidery silk, but then I thought of eyelets, laces, ribbon. 33 eyelets later I needed a background.

I pulled out a canvas board and my folder of brown papers. I placed the piece on different papers to choose the sort of brown I wanted then started to mix paint. I started with something a bit darker than what I wanted, knocked it back with crumpled paper, let it dry. I added a coat of the same colour with more white added and knocked that back with crumpled paper too. By now I'm talking about 36 hours after I started, what with waitng for this, that and the next thing to dry! Then I added the gold map lines. Do you remember me developing this iconographic shorthand? You can see it here.

Then the bit that always flummoxes me - getting the forground stuck on the background and getting it central and straight. I didn't do too badly!

Here's a detail to show the gold foil showing through, it doesn't show up well in the scan.

I am so happy with this whole new set of techniques I've employed, and can't wait to experiment more with that silk. There seems to be so much potential to layer all sorts and make all sorts of interesting surfaces. But really I'm half way through a drawing, and I need to get on and make that shrine ... But so much fun on the way!

Uphill

At last, today I have finished the drawing I've been working on since Thursday. It has been so nice to hold a 4B pencil in my hand and just draw. At times like these I wonder why I have all this stuff cluttering up my art room when all I need is a pencil, a putty rubber and a big sheet of drawing paper.


Being graphite I had all the usual problems with getting the photograph. It's A2 paper so no chance with the scanner. So I had to hold the paper at a weird angle so as not to get the flash flare.

I drew this from a photo from our walking holiday in the Lake District last year. I am still on my quest to improve my drawing of people. I am not sure if this is a useful quest to pursue, I think maybe I should set it aside and draw things I'm better at drawing. But I do think I've made a little progress with this one. I've been reading a book on figure drawing by a very engaging author and artist called Anthony Ryder, and am learning lots from him. But am I learning enough? Or should I go back to drawing boots?

Recycled art journal - and whether to scan or photograph
For a few weeks now I have been in the process of making a new art journal. It shouldn't really be such a long process but I have done it in a few stages. I did begin by documenting it with photographs to do a tutorial for you all, but I only did so for the initial binding then got carried away with the cover and forgot to take photographs. I can upload the photos I did take if anyone wants to see them.

I wanted to make the journal from recycled materials so I started with a load of scrunched up brown packaging paper from a recent delivery. I flattened it out roughly and began to tear my pages. I wanted it to have a ragged look so just folded and tore quite loosely. In the book you can see that the horizontal edges tore with the grain and the vertical edges tore against it. Once I had my pages I ironed them (yep, one of those conversation stoppers again!) so they would like flat.

I sorted them into signatures, punched my holes and bound them with waxed linen thread.

That all happened quite quickly, then it sat around for a week or two while I thought about the cover. In the end I used a cut down section of an Amazon box. I folded it to give a spine and back and front, basically by laying the bound pages inside and folding it where it needed. Then it sat around for awhile more.
In the end I pulled the threads through the spine of the cover and tied them off with some African beads. I didn't have any plan for this part, just pulled out my bead box and looked through til I saw them. That gave me a colour scheme so I got out my acrylics and gave the outside of the cover a coat of terracotta paint. It looked a bit dull so I grabbed my drypoint tool and started scoring lines into the cardboard. This disrupted the paint somewhat and started to look interesting. I started to rub in Treasure Gold, intending to just catch the cracks, but it had other ideas and became a bit overwhelming.
I went over the whole lot with a couple of glazes of Azo Gold and the Tressure Gold started to float as though under water. It's hard to show this in the pictures but looks like the gold is suspended between the layers.

On the front cover I outlined the cracks with black CD marker, but I didn't do this on the back. I decided I prefered it un-outlined, but once you've done half an inch you're committed to the whole page!
The insides of the covers got a couple of coats of the original terracotta.

It is always a dilemma whether to scan or photograph things like this. Often a scan works best, and, if what I have to scan is A3 or smaller that is usually my preference, even for quite bulky things. But when something shiny or metallic is involved the scanner just doesn't pick it up so I get out the camera. The disadvantages of photographs though, are getting the alignment right so that rectangular things look rectangular, and getting colours right. Also, with anything in the least bit shiny, even the sheen on a coloured pencil drawing, the flash bounces off the sheen and whites out part of the image. The way to get round this is often to take the photo from an angle, but then you're back with the alignment issue. So I have done both for this post. The first image of the front cover is a scan, the second is a photo of the front cover.

How we suffer for our art!

And that was to be the end of the post, but I must comment on that phrase before I go. I read recently that the intended meaning of "suffer" is effort rather than pain. It made me like the phrase a lot more. I don't see the need or purpose of causing ourselves pain in the name of art, but putting effort into what we do is necessary and a joy. I am happy to suffer in that respect.