I’m also getting a serious yen for a Munny to deface. The creativity people are bringing to bear on these little plastic blank canvases is amazing. There’s something really compelling in these bizarre and wonderful variations evolving from the same starting point.

As a paltry offering, I drew these in honour of Easter today:

…which reminds me: I’d better start sorting out my seeds for planting.

These are little animated gift icons that Xanga users can buy with their ‘eProp’ currency. I was commissioned to illustrate and animate the five below; these were drawn directly into Flash, because I knew they’d need to be animated, although I did sketch a couple on paper first. In fact, you can see some rough versions of the soup (chicken noodle!) and heart in a previous sketch post here. I was contemplating posting the Flash animations, but I think I’ll leave those for Xanga users to discover. The style brief was quite open, so these were huge fun to create! Go, go, go create Xanga blogs!

Okay, I’m off to do work on another drypoint plate for printing tomorrow. I discovered the wonderful joys of offsetting prints onto plates last time, so this will be my first two-colour/multi-plate intaglio print.

(I just realised that I started this blog almost exactly a year ago: happy birthday piemash blog!)

I briefly went home to London a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t been back in a few years, so it was a wee bit of a culture shock. My beloved Borough Market and South Bank are now uber-trendy capitals of culture. It’s lovely to see the development going on down there, but a tiny part of me misses the old tranquility of the river. The Borough and Waterloo were my childhood hunting grounds - nearly every weekend my dad would take us on a photo expedition from Hay’s Galleria, past the Kathleen & May, the Clink, and along the river up to Westminster. I used to skateboard under the Royal Festival Hall, and one of my first jobs was at the then-newly-opened London Aquarium. Of course, I adore the Tate Modern - I’ve always loved the Bankside Power Station, and I have a vivid memory of my dad promising me a fiver if I could count all the bricks in the building. I rummaged in my parent’s attic and dug out a load of my old A Level photography prints of the dilapidated old dock warehouses at the Borough - these are now food and drink emporiums. Still, we got some gorgeous mushrooms and unusual tomatoes. Mmm.

One of the highlights was this interactive aquatic sculpture, ‘Appearing Rooms’ by Jeppe Hein:

These were four ‘rooms’ created by high pressure water-jets - each wall rose and fell at random so, once inside, you had to shift from room to room to get out without getting soaked. Mum and I stayed in it for far too long - I want one!

I didn’t get a chance to see the Anthony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward (I remember being amazed by ‘Field’ in situ at the Hayward many years ago), but I did take a photo of one of the many full-body casts dotted around the area like attemptive suicides.

I love them.

Gabriel’s Wharf is still just the same, and I bought my first original print from the Southbank Printmaker’s Gallery: an etching by Teresa Pateman that I fell in love with. She had another piece there that was absolutely gorgeous - a glowing pot of tea and a custard cream - but my wallet was a bit bare. I must find out how she gets those gorgeous glowing colours and gradients in her prints.

Yesterday, I went down to the studio to meet Margaret Becker, the founder, and take my first class in carborundum and drypoint. I’ve never done intaglio printing and I’ve never actually used a press, so I was really excited! It’s a lovely place - much larger than I’d imagined - and they have a fantastic set-up: five presses, a large exposure unit, a guillotine room, an etching/aquatint room, a dark-room, and even a wee kitchen. Margaret tells me that they’re also getting a screenprinting set-up some time in the near future.

Intaglio vs. Relief

Up to this point I’ve only ever done relief printing: an image is carved into the plate (be it wood or lino or whatever), ink sits on the top of the plate avoiding the cut away areas, and is directly transferred to the paper. Intaglio, however, is sort of the reverse of relief printing - ink is pushed into the marks on the plate, the surface is wiped clean, and then the force of the press pushes dampened paper into the lines/marks on the plate, thus transferring the ink. In relief printing, your cut-away areas won’t be printed, so you have to visualise your plate as a negative, but in intaglio, your cut away areas will be printed, so it’s more like a straight drawing process. It’s hard to do intaglio without a press, because of the sheer force needed to push the paper into the indents on the plate, which is why I’ve never done it before. I was once tempted to try driving the car over a plate, but that’s another story!

Carborundum

We started with carborundum, which is a more painterly printmaking process in which you mix fine mineral particles into a strong glue (we were using strong wood adhesive), and paint the resulting mixture directly onto the plate; the more carborundum in the mixture, the darker the resulting print tone.

Drypoint

Whilst waiting for the carborundum plates to dry, I started on a drypoint piece. With drypoint, you scrape/scratch your image into your plate (I was using metal here - I’m not sure what type), so it’s very like normal drawing, which appeals to me. I used to do a lot of pen and ink drawings with crosshatched shading, so hopefully I can transfer that technique to drypoint.

The time flew, and we only had a chance to take a proof of my first carborundum plate:

I know, I know - it’s totally feeble, but I was just playing with the carborundum and trying out a few brush-stroke styles to see what sort of results I could get. The squares at the top are swatches of different glue-to-carborundum ratios - the darkest tone having quite a lot of carborundum in the mixture and the lightest being mostly glue. Margaret gave me some carborundum, perspex and metal off-cuts to take home and practice on, so I’m going to take a bit more time with both processes and see what I can come up with.

I had a really great time - I spend far too long staring at the computer screen, so it’s lovely to get my hands inky and see actual, physical results rather than pixels on a screen. I’m also thrilled that I can have access to print facilities without trekking into Dublin. The studio is going to be running a few different workshops in various techniques over the autumn - woodblock, photoetch, etc. - so I’m looking forward to trying my hand at lots of different processes.

I’ve also applied to one of the NCAD CEAD courses for studio skills and notebook research in October, so hopefully I’ll get in. I’m tentatively thinking about doing an MA at some point, so I want to start dipping my toe into the educational waters again.

Outdated Flash 8 Tip Probably of Use to Nobody but Me:

I’ve been using Flash 8 for client interface design work recently and, as I’m used to MX 2004, I was completely confuzzled by the new drawing modes. I’d draw a line, and it would automatically be grouped on-stage. This meant that my drawing process in Flash - 1. draw a line, 2. curve it - had two additonal steps to it - 1. draw a line, 2. break it down, 3. click off it to deslect, then 4. curve it. Argh! I knew there must be something in the preferences to stop objects automatically grouping and, after some rummaging, I discovered the new drawing modes - well, new if you’re a couple of years behind in software updates like me! Just clicking on this little button:

…in the tools palette enables you to switch between ‘merge’ drawing mode (the Flash we know and love) and ‘object’ drawing mode (scary, Illustrator-like Flash).

I hope to get some more actual drawing done this weekend and next week - like, y’know, on paper. I’ve never been too fabulous at human characters, so I’d like to try to develop my own character style - a quick illustrative shorthand that will enable me to draw people in any pose. That’s my project for the weekend, anyway - barring any unforeseen client work landing in the in-box. We shall see if I come up with anything worth posting! The Illustration Friday topic this week is ‘Discovery’ which also brings to mind some nice little ideas…

One of the first games I played on Ye Olde Amiga was LucasArt’s Monkey Island, and it’s a game series entirely responsible for my addiction to point-and-click style adventures - and pirates! Bill was responsible for the layout art and look and feel of the third game, which moved away from the pixelated computer graphics to fully hand-drawn backgrounds and animation. The visuals in The Curse of Monkey Island are stunning, and it’s one of the few games I’ve ever replayed just to take screen-shots of the artwork.

I still call those swirly, stylised clouds ‘Monkey Island Clouds’ whenever I see anything akin to them in artwork.

I’m really excited to see that he’s founded a games company and is currently working on an adventure game called A Vampyre Story. The only thing better than pirates? Vampires! The initial concept art looks fantastic, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the completed game.

Bill Tiller Links:

Autumn Moon Entertainment
Interview at World of Monkey island
Interview at the SCUMM Bar