Bathers Screen-Prints

After the SOS project was finished I felt that I wanted to revisit the drawing I did of the wee men on rubber rings and lilos:

I took it as an opportunity to practice screen printing this week (and procrastinate from other projects).

My initial attempts were OK but I hadn't prepared the separations well and they just didn't look right so I decided to experiment a little with the outlines and creating a blurred sort of 3D drawing type thing:

They came out pretty well but I still felt I hadn't resolved the image in the way I had intitially planned so today I went back to the print workshop today and am so chuffed with how the prints came out:

I like the experiments I did with using scraps of paper behind the men and in general I'm really happy with the image, I can imagine using it as a repeat pattern for textiles or wrapping paper or something.

Leaf Poster

Not a project as such but recently a poster idea came fully formed into my head so I wanted to try it out. I simply made it by scanning in cut-out letters and autumn leaves covered over by a bit of black paper and it came out looking amazing, exactly as I'd imagined it, just wish I actually had something to use it for.

Beam Book

After the one-day book project we had a slightly more generous timescale of one week to make another book based around a time we picked out of a hat. I got 3.41 am which seemed like a good time at the... time... but I was a bit stumped for ideas. Inspiration struck when I glanced over at a couple of Polaroids I'd picked up off the pavements of G-hill and decided to base the story around them.

Using information from the pictures I came up with a story about a boy called James (his name is written on a drawing on the wall) who gets up in early in the morning every day and goes downstairs and plays with this huge winged mouse with antennae... who turns out to be his gran. So not exactly Gullivers Travels but I decided to just go with it. Again with this project I used drawing and forced myself to draw things I thought would be difficult.

Next I put together the drawings with elements from the photos (such as wallpaper) on Photoshop and added text I typed on my typewriter. I initially intended to screenprint it but it seemed like it was going to be pretty complicated so I decided to use the acetone transfer method I had tried in first year and totally forgotten about since.

So a good body of work for this project plus loads of books I can sell!

Running Away Book

Last week we were given a day project to make a story book on the theme of "running away" which had to have a ladder on page 4. Using these limitations I decided to do quite a simple but surreal snakes and ladders type thing with a character running away from a snake but not quite escaping it.

As it was just a day project I kept the drawing style really simple to make it as clear as possible. Even with that there is a bit of ambiguity in the story at the end - originally I intended that the character was sleeping in the chair and the snake was ready to attack but the way I drew it it ended up looking quite friendly so I guess it's up to the viewer to decide. All in all an enjoyable project and not bad for a days work.

SOS Project Development

After my crit the other week I decided to develop my third idea for the SOS project so I started looking at American motels and people like Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore. I liked the idea of the road trip - a part of American culture that's fading away due to the increasing popularity of air travel and was interested in the idea of boom towns and once successful businesses left behind.

It was difficult working out how to portray my motel as the temptation was to throw loads of media at it and draw a big sign and loads of details which I think actually detracted from the meaning of the image.

Although I liked the look of it I knew it wasn't portraying the feeling of isolation I wanted and had achieved in earlier images, so I pared back the design and changed the scale and perspective.

I initially drew my final piece in the wrong scale so added in bits of paper around it, intending to take away the visible seams using photoshop, however when it was cropped down I actually quite liked the effect and decided to keep it, which also meant less work to do as a bonus. I'm pretty happy with the final piece which is quite different from the kind of thing I usually do and hopefully captures an atmosphere nicely.