Look! ART!
Actually this is just a bit of cardboard I used to spray paint various things on.
I like the way the layers build up on things like this; I have a calico cover that was stripped off one of the screen-printing tables at polytech when the tables were being renewed that is covered in little (and not so little) images and patterns from several years of student printing. I wonder where it is these days? Somewhere safe, no doubt.
This is a smallish (450 x 300 mm) oil that I began without any clear idea where I was going, except to repeat a composition I'd done in acrylics and oil pastels quite a few years ago.
Now I've stalled on it. I feel that it needs something more, but what that is I don't really know.
I'll put it aside for a year or tow, and perhaps revisit it then. Or maybe not.
Acrylics on pre-stretched canvas .
I've become very lax about drawing, not least because I tend to waste my life away these days on the goddam internet instead of doing anything productive.
I really need to take myself in hand and get back to drawing every day, even if it's just nonsense like this.
These two guys I drew in Indian ink, using a couple of dip pens.
My hands are not as steady as they once were, but I'm sure that a bit of practice will help with that — or at least let me figure out how to work around it.
This pen, 190mm long, I did in red beech, with no finish except for some oil and beeswax. It's a pretty boring timber with the sole virtue that it's pretty easy to work.
The nib is held in place with a bamboo plug fixed by friction alone, and though it would be theoretically possible to swap nibs, effectively it's a permanent fixture.
My favourite of these four is the second from the right; my least favourite is the right-most one.
The one on the right is made from stainless steel I think, and it's quite stiff and unresponsive. The other three are made from very thin, springy carbon steel, and they'll give me a beautifully fluid and variable line.
They take a bit of getting used to for anyone used to drawing with, say, modern fibre-tipped pens or the like. The croquil nibs are very sharp, and will dig into the paper at the least excuse. If the tip catches, the springy steel releases very suddenly and can spatter ink a surprisingly long way. They require a very sensitive and delicate hand, and unlike a ball-point pen, they can't just be scrubbed around in any old direction.
I've had these pens for years, and I love them, but the nibs aren't immortal. They do wear out. And I know remarkably little about them as a class of tool, so if I have to replace them I'd really be flailing in the dark a bit.
I think the one on the left is a Speedball Hunt nib, but I couldn't swear to it. The second one to the right has 66 (or maybe 99, but I'm pretty sure it's 66) engraved on its barrel. What that means, I have no real idea.
I had a go at making a holder for my favourite croquil nib from a fragment of oak. It works well and feels good in the hand, though I think I was a bit timid about thinning down the tail — that could go a little further.
The nib is held in place in its 6mm hole by a short oak plug. It's pretty firm. I bored the hole a bit too deep, which made getting the nib in the right place more troublesome than it needed to be; in future I'll measure the length of the nib's barrel before I bore the hole.
Buying a commercial version of this thing would be about ten bucks, which means that making my own isn't exactly fiscally viable if I was charging minimum wage for my own time. However, it is satisfying.
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| Output — my hands aren't as steady as they once were |
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| Right to left: Hunt 101 Speedball 99 Speedball C-5 Speedball D-5 |
It goes without saying that different nibs give you very different results. The two croquil nibs (the 101 and 99) are very similar, with just a difference in average line weight. The C-5 provides much less line weight variation, though there is a little. And the D-5, with its disc-end, gives a very heavy and consistent line, varying only because the disc on the end of the nib is oval, not round.
I scribbled this some time back in 2017-18, and just got around to colouring it with Faber-Castell aquarelle pencils.
The others (below) I did relatively recently, while up in the Bay of Plenty.
Linocut, 107x147mm
The final print was done on Fabriano Tiepolo paper, which is a smooth-surfaced 290gsm stock, very well suited for printmaking.
If you compare this one with the test print below, which was done on ordinary desktop printer paper, you can see how much better the Fabriano paper takes up the ink.
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| Blind Stamping |
I've included my seal stamp by Blind Stamping, in which the block is impressed into the paper without any ink.
It's different from watermarking, which you can also see an example of in the bottom right: a watermark is laid into the mesh that the wet pulp is laid on to make the sheet, and the resulting pattern shows in the finished paper.
(90gsm printer paper)
I've experimented with the blocks a bit in this one.
The key block (the outlines) is in no way unusual. It was printed in burnt sienna.
The background (the sky and plane) had the foreground silhouettes cut out, and then the block was cut in half along the horizon line and inked up separately. I cut a horizon line before I decided to cut the block in half, which is why there's a white line there.
The sky block was inked with a red-yellow gradient, the plane with a simple solid chrome yellow.
The blue block was quite straightforward. I had to do quite a bit of cleaning of the block before printing to avoid printing-in, and I'll probably end up cutting all those open areas away completely.
The last block, with the colour areas for the man's face and trousers, was cut only locally where there was detail. I inked in the face area by dabbing ink on to the block with my finger, and the trouser area was inked up through a paper stencil.
It comes as no surprise that paper quality affects print quality, but this I didn't expect to such a degree: the Winsor & Newton cartridge paper gives a perceptibly fuzzier and chalkier print than the Fabriano drawing paper. The difference is even more apparent in real life than in the photo.
The Fabriano is smoother and stiffer than the W&N for a start; I suspect that it's been sized and polished, so the ink sits more on the surface and sinks in less. That would certainly explain the crisper edges.
This is an insert to fit a Parker Quink bottle, with an internal neck diameter of 30mm.
With the insert in place and the cap on the bottle, the user can just tip the bottle to fill the reservoir. Then a dip-pen or brush can be loaded easily without having to reach right down into the bottle, avoiding a whole lot of potential messiness.
Printed PLA doesn't create a reliably watertight object, so I suspect the ink may seep away over time. However, it's a simple matter to just refresh the reservoir, or else I guess you could line the inside of it with epoxy or something.
The STL can be downloaded free from https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5984034
I've started a new painting. Acrylics so far.
I have only the vaguest idea about what I want to do with it; I'll just let it develop as it wants to I guess. The terracotta colour is just a base coat, there won't be anything much left of it in the final image.
It's not huge — just 800 x 300 mm, on canvas.
I'm really not confident when it comes to colour.
Note: it's upside-down in the photo, so that I can reach the top half while I'm sitting down.
My stand-up easel is too tall for the low ceiling in my workroom, which means that a canvas on it is too low to stand at comfortably. One option would be to chop a bit off the top, but I am loathe to do that, so instead I made a shelf to lift the canvas up to a more comfortable height.
It's made of scraps of pine and macrocarpa that I had lying around. I should probably get a couple of small G-clamps to hold it firmly in place, but I think it should be okay for the moment as long as I don't get too enthusiastic.
I have another (smaller) table easel, but I've almost never used it, as I find it rather uncomfortable to paint on a near-vertical surface when sitting at a table.
I lost my old bamboo mahl stick, so I made a new bamboo mahl stick. This one is nicer.
A mahl stick is used as a hand rest for painting. The end is covered in a soft material that won't (hopefully) damage the surface; in this case it's some of that sticky silicone shelf liner.
The shaft is a bit of bamboo from our garden, the knob on the end is turned from a bit of an old broom handle.
When you're finished painting, you can flourish it at people and cry out "Expelliarmus!" It won't do anything, but there you go.
I've shown these before, but I thought I'd get them all into one place. They're a series of illustrations for the Tale of Tuan Mac Cairill, a very ancient Irish origin story about the coming of the first men to Ireland. Tuan does a lot of transforming into animals.
