Fishbowl

At the start of this year, to get ourselves back into the way of working and using our sketchbooks, alongside Andrew Morrison of New Dead Language / Co:Lab we set out to get back to basics with a week long "Doodle Week". (See post here). Doodle week looks set to become an ongoing exercise.
The rules were simple, each member must produce one sketch per day, with the main objective to get back into the way of working after the holidays but also to have a, lets say, "bank" of possible ideas to take forward and produce into prints.

The original shown above. A few people have asked, "what does it mean?". I'm not ashamed to say it has no meaning, it was totally a case of visualizing an image in my head and putting pencil to paper to make it a reality. I did want to create a sense of spookiness/eeriness/weirdness, I hope it comes across.

It could be said the girl takes influence from the twins in 1980 psychological horror film, The Shining. The girls in the film may have been based on a photo by American photographer Diane Arbus - 1967 photo of identical twins shown below:

It may be interesting to make a matching print of the girls twin, but that will be something for another day... For now the final print below:

You can see I kept pretty true to the original sketch, I already had a good idea for how I wanted it to look when I did it, so it was quite a seemless process from sketch to print, just spanned out over a much longer time than I normally work ie not to set deadline, exhibition, client etc.

Sketch produced in January and artwork inked over the next few months when I had a spare moment, to final print in mid May.

Fishbowl
Colour: 2 Layers - black on red
Size: A4
Edition: 10
Stock: Revive 100 325gsm Matt
Signed and numbered

Buy Fishbowl on Etsy:

Co:Lab Exhibition: Heart Your Head

The Goodwill Merchant

If you read my last blog post (Printing with a view - 27 April 2011) you would have seen my girlfriend and me were house sitting out in the country for a week. At the end I mentioned I was also working on another print during that week and would be posting soon...

The Goodwill Merchant





About the print
The Goodwill Merchant
Colour: 2 Layers - cyan on cyan
Size: A3
Edition: 10
Stock: 340gsm Revive 50:50 Matt
Signed and numbered (note: not photographed)

Buy Beard Sea on Etsy:


After a bit of internet research about the area we were staying in for the week, I found out about a ship that wrecked in 1976 on the coast nearby - Goodwill Merchant. The article linked mentioned of some the lost cargo of the ship being new cars. All the work that went into manufacturing and shipping the cars, just lost like that. Don't mess with the sea.


The print is also a nod towards how some cars on the islands were disposed of until not too long ago (see youtube video I came across a few years back: !!!)


I began thinking about the amount of car parts at the bottom of the ocean around Shetland.

Process and (lack of) time
So time really went way too fast during the last three days house sitting, and I had to rush away to Aberdeen at the end of the week, leaving no time to update this here blog.

Wed 27 - Research, Initial drawing and layout:


Thurs 28 - Finish Layer 1 inking + Beetle - photographed below, crawled up the leg of my jeans whilst I was inking, aaah!

+ After some heavy inking over the 2 days I finally finish on Thursday night.



Thursday night ends with a late night journey to town to print film positives for exposure to screen for Friday morning.

It was quite strange, after printing the film I drove past this wrecked car, which looked like it had possibly been fished out of the harbour. (poor quality phone pic)


The 2 positive films held together in the light, can kind start to get a taste of how the print will work:


Fri 29 - The main reason we were house sitting was to look after 4 excellent cats. One of which is a natural hunter - he brought us 2 rabbits and on the last morning, this mouse, who had seen better days but survived!

Exposure of screen + printing. Here is a pic of the garage converted to temporary print workshop. Note the bamboo drying racks: its the way forward!


Then there was a mad dash to catch my flight. No time to even blink on the last day! But really pleased with how much I managed to get done over the week.

Well that's my holidays, now back to my day job.