This week I have been hand cutting a woodblock based on one of the doodles from our Co:Lab February Doodle Week. (Sketch below) More about the doodle: The idea of doodle week is to come up with ideas everyday for possible prints. I stretched the rules a little bit - in that on doodle week Tuesday - I sketched the wavy lines which I wanted to be a rough sea, but wasn't sure where it was going so gave up for the day. When I revisited it on the Wednesday I instantly saw a beard - I must have been inspired a little bit by Up Helly Aa season and Vikings. So - Beard Sea!
For me the idea was screaming out to be a woodblock print so I got carving... Inked up and ready to print: The final prints: Hip hip hooray!!
Anyone looking out of their windows in the early hours of this morning may have been shocked to see a man running around waving his arms. I'd like to say thank you for not phoning the police, and it was not a mad man, but it was me... at work..?
Shetland Youth Theatre are putting on a production of "Too Fast", By Douglas Maxwell, directed by John Haswell - part of The National Theatre Connections. (more info and tickets)
Having only 24 hours to do the artwork for the promotional material, the director John Haswell and myself sat down and did some research into ideas for the poster. After a while we came up with the idea of using light graffiti to create a surreal, artificial look, mixed with a real world scene.
But with no stock photography on hand, the challenge was to get this ready overnight. At 4.30pm I ran over to the nearest DIY store, Frank Williamson's, and found a cheap LED torch. Just one of them ones that can connect to your keys. The problem with this being a rushed project, I had already made plans for my Tuesday night. Leaving no time to work at night. My plan was to get up at 6am Wednesday to catch the last bit of darkness before sunrise at 7.41am. But came 3am I was wide awake in bed ready to go - so I just got up and started with some indoor (warm) tests. I got the camera ready inside - and after I was happy with the technique I was ready to move outside and for more space to experiment and have fun. A selection of some of the different options we had for the poster.
Recently I was asked to visualise "Hot Topic Taxi", a segment featured on BBC Radio Shetland's monthly programme, Sideways, a sideways look at Arts & Culture in Shetland hosted by Mark Inchley. The animation will be used on Facebook/Youtube etc to 'visualise' this part of the show online.
Mark originally came to me with the idea to have a static drawing of two people in a taxi (see sketch of idea by Mark below) with the area in black in the back window transparent with a video of a road moving in the background. After a bit of brainstorming over the idea - I proposed an idea, and a challenge for myself to work within a tight budget to produce something more usable and dynamic than the original brief of a static image.
The challenge I set was to produce 3 or 4 very short animations (around 5 seconds long each). They would be of a very rough quality, which I supply for the Sideways guys to cut together themselves using some sort of movie software.
I had a listen to the audio and started quickly sketching out what I thought the characters, taxi and setting looked like. Once I had an idea for what I wanted them to look like the final elements were roughly drawn with a soft pencil then scanned and saved each element as a separate transparent file. I used Adobe After Effects to create a really basic set of the flat layers with a camera positioned in front of the placed elements to create the look of a 3D world with elements moving at different speeds to create a depth of field. View from right of the placed camera in After Effects. Next to make the action - the backgrounds were set to move using two keyframes for start position end position. The characters and car were set to wiggle randomly to look as if driving in a real car. The mouths only had to loop a basic speaking pattern and this was quite quickly done by making a photoshop file with the 4 different mouth positions required. In After Effects I trigger which layer should be visible at a given time using time remapping. I type "0" for what is called "layer 2" above, "1" for "Layer 3" and so on. I looped a segment of the mouth movement and used the same mouth for both characters.
I like to use this project as an example of what you can do working to a budget.
Another small test woodblock print from last night. Again really just playing about trying to get an idea of how it all works. Thing to learn from this is: when I've done my sketch on paper and before drawing and carving the block - I need to remember to mirror my image! Pretty obvious, but good to carve it into my brain now before I do something bigger.
Tonight I have been working on some test woodblock prints, practicing how to make a woodcut and print it on some small offcuts of boxwood. I'm looking to do a project with a much larger sized woodcut in the near future. Will need alot more smaller tests before I tackle the big one. Quite please with the qualities of the woodcut, will explore more... And the second one - "Happy as Sad" (test).
I also used the left over ink from the roller plate to make a monotype print: (Monotype: A unique print made by pressing paper against a painted or inked surface. Different from monoprint in that the plate used only exists once.)
