Thursday, October 31, 2013

Arts for the Art Pile



Arts. Arts from one of my many current Books o' Doodles.

Friday, October 25, 2013

T-Shirts

These things I made are things I made. Not the shirts, I didn't make them. I just printed the ink on to the outside of them.

I'm teaching a screenprinting class at the moment, and I did these in a lunch break. The shirts are el-cheapo ones from the Warehouse.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Boo-Tee. Booty.

Booty for the day:

  • Stanley No.7 jointer plane. This is a biggie, about 650mm long and heavy. It's in very good nick, though it is desperately in need of sharpening (as are all of these).
  • Stanley No.71½ brass-body "granny's tooth" router plane, with a patent mark for 1884. Annette's favourite; she thinks it looks cute. It kind of does.
  • A pair of beech spokeshaves.

The big No.7 plane is used for getting lengths of timber dead straight, hence its length. They're not much used any more; its function has mostly been taken over by mechanical jointers these days. That means that they can be phenomenally expensive to buy new, though it's well worth shopping around.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

A small thing, but mine own

Having managed to wrestle my workshop into some kind of semi-usable order (although it still doesn't have any electricity except what I can feed it by dangling an extension lead out the kitchen window) I finally got on to building this little oak foot-rest my friend Helen asked for months and months ago.

It's a simple little thing, but it has shown me a couple of things.

First, I could really do with a bandsaw. I have a scroll-saw, but it really doesn't cut it (badoom-tssshh!) when it comes to hefty chunks of oak. I cut the curves on the ends of this with a coping saw, and while that's workable, and craftsmen used to do it all the time back in Ye Olden Days, I really do prefer to let machines do all the hard work wherever possible. Alas, decent bandsaws are quite expensive, but even a crappy little baby hobbyist saw would be better than nothing.

In a similar vein, a disc sander would be a boon. A disc and bobbin sander would be even better.  I've jury-rigged my belt sander on to its side to act as a stop-gap, but it's not entirely suitable; it's still a lot better than sanding down raggedy coping-saw cuts by hand though.

The deficiencies of my crappy little Ryobi table saw have been brought into sharp, glaring focus. It really is a piece of shit. Fortunately, for this job I could mostly get away with using my Makita sliding drop-saw, which is very nice indeed.

Most of all, I NEED to make more space. I can only make use of about a third of the garage I'm working in; the remainder is full of crap. Pointless crap for the most part that could be thrown away without a qualm.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

The Bouletcorp

If you like sequential graphic story art novels (or whatever the cool kids are calling comics these days), then you will almost certainly love the work of this French dude.

The stuff I've linked to here is his blog, so it's mostly autobiographical. I like the way his brain works. Of his print work, the only stuff I've seen are his contributions to Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar's "Dungeon" series.

The French have a wonderful tradition of graphical story-telling, and Boulet is right up there with the best.