Tuber-head

 

This is a drawing I did back in 2010, at Winter Weekend.

It's watercolour and indian ink, drawn with a croquil nib. It's about A4.

Regrettably, I have lost the sketchbook I drew this in. It's a great shame, because it was a really good sketchbook. I've looked and looked, but I just can't find it. It's a complete mystery to me.

Silhouette

 

We have a silhouette, made in 1851, of a great-great-great-uncle, Alfred Edward Hands, when he was two. (There may be another great or two in there).

It really needs a bit of protection from ambient dust and dirt and what-not, so I shall have to make a glassed-in shadow box to house it.

The drawing-in over the silhouette appears to have been done with a gold stylus; the metallic sheen doesn't really come through well in this scan. The background drawing — the toy and floorboards, and the curls of hair — appear to have been done in croquil pen and ink line and washes. I'd describe it as being careful and meticulous work, to a good professional standard, rather than the work of a highly skilled artiste. Nevertheless, it's a pretty little thing.

Next day...

The shadow-box is complete, and Alfred is safe behind glass. I've left a space at the bottom for a caption plate, which I will no doubt get around to in another decade or so.

I used a nicely figured bit of rimu for the frame, and plain old 7mm plywood for the backing board. The top is not glued, just held in place by brass screws, so I can access the innards at my whim.

Topical Woodblock Print

 

Colour mock-up
— will probably change a bit

Let's start from the end. This is the completed woodcut in three colours (four if you count the seal stamp). It was printed in "Flint" water-based relief inks on a registration stage, using one of my glass-bead barens.

Process

The design is drawn on to 3mm MDF in Indian ink. That orangy-yellow is just there to make it easy for me to see where I have and haven't cut the MDF away.

MDF has its pluses and minuses as a woodcut medium. It has no grain, and it's easy to cut with sharp tools. It's like very hard lino in that respect, except that you can manage finer detail than you can in lino. On the other hand, it's a bit fibrous and fragile, and it's very easy for small details to be torn away by the pressure of the gouge. Also, the silica in it is pretty hard on edges, and you need to be sharpening a lot more than you would with proper wood or lino.

The wooden handled gouges in the stand (to the right) are all very cheap, and the steel is, frankly, not great. The blue ones in the foreground I got when I was at polytech; they were more expensive, though not desperately so — I think a set cost about thirty bucks — and their steel is much better, taking and keeping a much better edge.

Here's the first test print, to see if or where any more cutting needs to be done. Overall, I'm reasonably happy with it so far.

This is not, I should note, a good print, and it's intended solely for informative purposes. It hasn't been inked up evenly, and it should have more ink on it, but inking up will get more consistent as the old ink seals the rather absorbent surface of the MDF.

Once the key block — the main detail block, usually containing all or most of the outlines — is done, the colour blocks are created by means of an offset printing process.

The blocks are all placed in exactly the same position, kept in place by the black cardboard tabs you can see surrounding it, and the key block is printed on to (in this case) a piece of clear plastic, also locked into position with masking tape. Acetate is better, as it takes the ink better and is more dimensionally stable. Paper is usable, but because it is absorbent it makes the transfer on to the other blocks less reliable.

Once the plastic is printed, key block is removed, and another block is placed into the printing position. The plastic, with its printed image, is lowered on to the new block and the ink rubbed on to its surface. I use a rubber brayer for this.

The process is repeated as many times as is necessary, and now I have a reference image on the colour blocks, exactly the same as the key block, that I can use to exactly register the cutting for each new colour.

I'll do as many blocks as I think I'll need, plus one or two more in case of fuck-ups.

In this case, I'm expecting to want two colours in addition to the key block, and I've done three colour blocks. 

Sketchbook

Here are some bits and pieces from one of my most recent sketchbooks.

I like to write little notes to myself, aides-memoire, about new tools or media or whatever, and my impressions of them.

I also write quite a lot of absolute bullshit.

Brush, fibre and ball-point pens

Parker ball-point

6B graphite pencil

Ball-point birds (mostly)

Dayglo Pixie

 

Technical pen on Reeves cartridge paper, digital colour

Approx. 70x80mm

Red Sky

I was talking to somebody today about oil pastels, and I was reminded of this thing that I did back in 2007. As far as I can recall, it was about 800 by 600 mm, on hardboard.

The background was painted by roller in a rather liquid vermillion gouache acrylic, and it dried to a quite mottled surface that I liked, and which warmed the whole composition quite substantially. The oil pastel I applied in rather a pointillist fashion over that red background, and the mauves and blues of the shadows make the background glow.

I rather like how it turned out. My mum has it now, if I remember correctly.

Dunes — woodblock

Woodcut, approx. 340 x 110 mm, oil-based inks

I found this little woodcut I did years and years ago at Hagley, when I was doing the prep course for entry into CPIT's design degree course.

It's a simple thing, but mine own. I quite like it, though I think the colours could do with a bit of refinement.

Skull-Bones

Hairy Fishy Critter

Here's a hairy fishy critter. I'm not completely sure that I'm finished with it just yet, but I'm finished enough for the moment.

Mostly done in Krita, with a little bit of help from Photoshop.

I really need to see if I can create custom brush collections in Krita; There are only a few that I use all the time, and it's kind of a pain constantly scrolling back and forth through all of the brush types to get to them.

Mystery Feet

I'm in the process of tidying up my workroom, so that I can tidy up another room's overflow, and I came upon this painting I did in 2005.

I have no memory of doing it, nor why it was done. The only reason I know it was 2005 is because I helpfully left a note to myself on the selvedge of the canvas.

It's oil-stick on unprimed canvas, roughly 680x850mm.

Fishy Doodle

Fishy

 These are not Daily Drawings, I just found them when I was flipping through the last few pages of one of my sketchbooks.

Both of them are A5, rollerball ink pen and coloured pencils.

Cascade

Daily Drawing 2018-12-09

My resolve to do a drawing a day lasted exactly one day. I forgot yesterday. Maybe I'll do another this evening.

Arty-Farty Resolution

I realised that it has been a considerable time since I drew or painted anything at all, and resolved to do at least one thing every day over the coming year, lest I lose all ability through sheer disuse.

I'll post each day's output here, no matter how awful it may be. Hopefully that will jog me along.

This is last night's effort, taken from a couple of old National Geographic photos. It's depressing how much one's skills deteriorate when one is slack and lazy about exercising them.

"Owl Sense" Cover

I've just received a copy of a book called Owl Sense by Miriam Darlington. It appears to be about owls. Definitely owl-related.

The reason they sent it to me is because I contributed graphics to the cover art. The tree in the background is a lift-ground etching I did some years ago.

It's nice to see one's work in published form.

Shouty

A5. Black ink pen and coloured pencils.

Heavy Metal

Maybe not.

Psychedelic!

Krita includes a tool they call Multibrush, which repeats strokes on a user-selectable number of axes. By default, the centre of rotation is the centre of the image, but that too can be changed. This image uses 16 axes throughout, but the number of axes can be changed on the fly.

It makes the creation of kaleidoscopic mandala images like this one very simple, but I don't really see much use for it other than that. Still, it's a fun toy as far as it goes.

Minis

Much fudging going on here. I got the hands very wonky.

Photoshop Brush Experimenting

I tend to collect things like brush sets for Photoshop and then never get around to actually using them.

The thing is, most of them are unlikely to be of much use, but buried in amongst the huge pile are some that I really like. I'm trying, therefore, to work my way through as many as I can, experimenting with them, to see whether I want to keep them or not.

This guy is a combination of two brushes: a very large textural brush that I used to create the canvas vignette effect, and a rough charcoal pencil brush that I did the drawing in, in pure black and white. It's about a five minute sketch, so not much of anything really.

I like these two brushes enough that they'll go into the "keep" pile.

Desert Rocks

Ball-point pen and aquarelle pencils on A5 cartridge