Tuesday 14 December 2021

Risk

 I was going to print this as a demonstration with the rolling-pin press but that fell through, so the block has been lurking in my bag for a few days. I woke up about 2am and couldn't gett back to sleep, so I got up at 4.30 and decided to run off a couple of proofs to see what it looks like. I think I need to trim a bit off the bottom line of the ankle, but apart from that I'm happy with how it's turned out. The picture is based on the drawing I did for day 31 of Inktober. The prompt was Risk and I think I'll keep that name.

The original drawing is a very light and airy line drawing, but I felt the print called for it to be night time. Doing feet had brought to mind something Tal R said about drawing people, the difficulties of drawing "nose, eyes ... and feets." I added the moon partly to reference something he said in one of the Louisiana Channel interviews, "The moon sees a lot." The moon certainly has a better idea of what is going on here. Better than me, anyway.

Sunday 5 December 2021

Comfortable Man

 


This started as a drawing I did a week or so in a class run by Eric Gaskell. Then I got persuaded to demonstrate printing at the Rugby Artists and Makers Pop-Up shop in Rugby Central, so I decided to work the drawing up into something I could do to amuse the crowds (sic). 

I decided to use craft foam and my rolling-pin press to double-down on the you-can-do-this-at-home thing. It also seemed an opportunity to show the old artist’s trick of emphasizing something light by placing it against a dark background and vice versa. Using craft foam also made it easy to do the “negative” version just by flipping over the bits I cut out of the other half. 

I like the 2-Tone thing that seems to be going on. It’s like “Whatever happened to the Rude Boys.”