A commission

A friend of my wife wanted this as a 10^th anniversary present for her husband. It's one of those family sayings that achieve a more general usage beyond their original purpose.

Doing something like this in wood or lino didn't seem feasible. It would have been rather time consuming and rendered a one-off a bit expensive.

But then I remembered craft foam. I had used it to print a simple design on to wood some time back, and had also seen a video of a school group using it. So this is what I proposed. It was quick and easy to use, and I was pretty pleased with the result. As was my wife's friend's husband.

The movie!

Well, it's a slide show, really.

With Warwickshire Open Studios going virtual this year, they have encouraged the artists to add some video to their profile. The WOS people will then try and create some buzz during the Art Weeks fortnight to try and pull some traffic in. We shall see how it all pans out.

I'd not done anything with the video editor that comes standard with Windows before – it's basic, but ably does the job. I'm pretty pleased with it. And when I asked Feline if it would be OK to use her music, she really liked it, too.

How Much? The making of a postcard

A few days back, Feline of Feline and Strange played the song, “How Much?” for a select bunch of supporters over the internet. She does a little video most every day to deal with the privations of lockdown. Anyway, “How Much?” is a great favorite. “Wolf in a Sheepskin” is based on it, too.

The song contains the line, “What is the formula to calculate the volume of the soul.” So I sent her this:

and explained that, “ Volume of the soul = the sum (from zero to n where n is the number of years lived) of good deeds minus bad deeds divided by number of years. All to the power 3 (because its a volume).” Also that I'd got a picture in my head of Death doing the math, so felt I had to work out the formula.

So, over this last weekend I decided to do a postcard based on that. “Why a postcard?” is probably another subject for a future post.

This was my first thought – scribbled in biro in a school exercise book.

You can see that Death is writing in a book with a quill pen and the formula is on a board behind him. The scribbled shape in the bottom right-hand corner is supposed to be an old-school adding machine. The kind with a handle on the side and a roll of paper that comes out the top.

Here are some more. In pencil in a sketchbook this time.

Below Death is a rough outline of an adding machine plus a hand holding a pen.

The scribbled writing next to it (believe it or not) is actually a note to myself telling me its the wrong hand. I drew my left hand using a mirror, which would be OK for a drawing, but in print the image gets flipped again, so it would go back to being the left.

Here are some more hands

...and the adding machine.

Though by this time I was beginning to realise that nobody would know what it was, especially on something so small as a postcard.

So, by the time I did the final sketch, I'd added a calculator that seems more... twentieth century.

I then traced this to the block, where the cutting process took over.

Well. That's the process of image development. Writing this, I realise there are other processes that deserve their own posts. But they're to be worked on in their own good time. So I'll end here with a photo of the first few hanging up to dry.