Life Drawing (26th Jan)

pencil drawing of scrunched-up magazine page

Woodcut Printing

 It started with a pencil drawing, with intentionally blocky tones added with grey marker pens, and black details added with a brush pen.

 

I decided to make two tone prints instead of the three tones I used in the drawing, due to time constraints. That would mean two prints, one over the top of the last one, to create the final image.
For the second, darker print (or whatever different ink you're using), you have to cut away at the same wood block you used for the last prints, so you can't go back once you start cutting away for the next stage. 

practise sheet

It's the jolly Christmas Eagle! yay!

 

the finished print

Letterpress Workshop

Back in December I had the chance to be introduced to the type printing facilities here at Plymouth University, one of three such places available in the UK apparently.

Paul Collier, the excellent print technician, showed us the ropes. The piece shown here is the collective work between the four of us, finding and placing the right letters and spacing pieces, before placing them together into a frame for printing. It takes ages, and requires a lot of patience and attention to detail.

For more info' I found a blog post by Creative Brkfst about their visit:
http://www.tee-dp.com/2010/11/november-2010-plymouth-uni-letterpress/

I went to the workshop just for the experience, after all I'm unlikely to see anything like it again once I've left uni. The result looks lovely. The pressure of the press embosses the paper so you can certainly notice the difference compared to inkjet or laser printing. I think I may use it to make some business cards for the end of year degree exhibition our course has in late May. 

As part of the workshop we were tasked with producing our name and two words to describe ourselves. The morning of the workshop was the same morning as the hand in for one of our degree modules, and I'd been up 'till late that night and I hadn't the time to have breakfast, so while others spent ages pondered their most notable qualities, I knew decidedly how to describe myself. :P

Mass Comic Experiment: Hangman

For this uni project, as a chance to blow out the cobwebs after summer adventures, each person in our year group was given two or three panels from the comic Hangman (no copyright ^_^ ) to completely redo with a new composition and in whatever style in b/w, with the intention of fitting all the panels back together again to make an interesting new comic based off the old one.

These were a one off, it's not my usual style, but I wanted to try it out since it wasn't meant to be a serious thing. Really quite fun to do too. I might work in this more graphical style again, inspired by PAL, a Latvian born illustrator.

The pics were done with a large chisel tip black marker Sharpie over a pencil sketch, and white gesso to hide mistakes, and maybe a bit of Tip-ex. :D

phone sketch to Photoshop painting

Last November I bought my first smart phone and discovered Sketcher, an app which allows you to create drawings using the phones touch screen. So if I don't have a sketchbook with me, I can whip out my phone and start drawing the first thing that falls into my head - fantastic!
What's really exciting to me though is how simple it is to bring the sketch onto my computer and start painting over it in Photoshop.
So, to get myself over the blue feelings the last university modules had put me under I decided to have a good Photoshop painting session last night. I love the result :)

Photoshop painting

Sketcher sketch

illus 210

For my main project at uni this last term, I decided to make pages for a wordless graphic novel made from collaged photos and rough sketches. I was disappointed with the overall final outcome of the spreads. It was time consuming and tedious work and after many long hours still looked pretty naff I felt. At least I know I don't want to do it ever again -ha.


Here are some of the best panels from it - there's no chance of me posting the whole thing.

click the image to see properly

Clouds are crumpled up bits of scrap paper

again, click the image to enlarge

The buildings are photographed keys, the sky is ripped paper which I scanned in

a doodle before bed