Eithin

Other people printing

2009-07-03T22:30:00.003Z

Elly (my girlfriend) was watching me do some printing the other day, and asked if she could have a go just as I was thinking about suggesting it. (Especially since I'd just picked up some Ellie Poo paper...) Here's the results. It's turned out rather nicely.

Recycled art papers

2009-07-03T21:58:00.004Z

I haven't been posting for a while, because Various Circumstances pretty much entirely took away my creative impulse. It's getting better now, though, and I've been doing some more printmaking. Partly, the impetus for that came from a visit to Falkiner's, and the discovery of three really nice recycled art papers.

The one in the centre there is Fabriano Ecologica - it's bright white, with a good middling texture, comes in two grades (Sketching and Drawing - Schizzi, Sketching, is 120gsm, and Drawing is heavier so I left that), and comes in A4 pads of 80 sheets for £6.50, which is a really good bargain for acid free good quality art paper. It's made entirely of recycled post-consumer materials using renewable energy; the pack quotes "more than 50% of the energy used for producing this paper is hydroelectric". There's inevitably going to be some secondary bleaching of the pulp, but still.

The one on the right is Redeem 130, which is a good solid, hard-textured paper with a pleasant parchment-beige tint. It looks like it will be extremely good for computer printing. Pleasantly, it's also extremely cheap!

The third, which I've been wanting to try out for some time, is Ellie Poo paper, which is as the name suggests made from elephant dung. It's lovely tactile stuff, with small vegetable inclusions and a warm pale beige colour.

Criticism

2009-04-21T11:00:00.003Z

This is a collage piece I made for the Eastercon art show, pretty much entirely as an experiment. It's one of my favourite SF short stories, Omnilingual by H Beam Piper (Project Gutenberg link) done using your basic papier-mache technique on a Daler board base. The discolouration is done with two layers of tinted glaze (gold, then brown) and edged with black acrylic. I'm quite pleased with the result, and I think I'll have to do some more of these in the future.

Barens and spoons II

2009-04-03T16:02:00.002Z

This is the print done with a spoon, as promised. It's slightly different paper (from my stock - I've not been keeping as good track of it as I'd like to, so I'm not completely sure whether this is Fabriano Accademia or Atlantis Heritage Woodfree).

Notice the sheer amount of ink on the flat areas, and the way all the internal cut ridges show up - they got just as much ink on them in the first one, but the baren didn't press the paper down into them in the same way that the hard, solid spoon does.

Unexpected bonus!

2009-04-02T19:49:00.001Z

Checking the cupboard, I've discovered I have a lot more Satirico mask blanks (the half-face masks with long hook-pointed noses) than I thought. I'd had the idea that I was down to one or two unused ones, but no, there are seven here, so I'm quite pleased.

And also about to do something creative to one or two of them.

Brigid's Cross print

2009-03-29T20:26:00.002Z

As promised!

This was the first one I pulled from the block, done on Daler-Rowney Canford paper with a (cheap) baren. The ones I did with a spoon are still drying, since there's so much more ink on them (in them, in fact) so I can't post a comparison picture yet.

Rather good fanart

2009-03-29T19:28:00.002Z

Found while wandering the internet in search of SFnal livejournal icons - Minerva McGonagall, in the style of Aubrey Beardsley.

Barens and spoons

2009-03-29T01:49:00.003Z

I've just taken half a dozen prints from the Brigid's Cross block I posted about before, since I finally finished carving it tonight.

It's always an amazing feeling to peel off the first print and see the results - once it translates itself from vinyl & wet ink to paper (and reverses itself in the process) it makes it really easy to look on my work with new eyes. It stops being the piece of vinyl I've had on my table for the last month, and I can finally see how all those awkward curves and chunky lines, the unexpected holes and the scars where the sankakuto slipped, transform themselves on paper.

I experimented for a couple of them, going back to the serving spoon (solid, sturdy 1950s EPNS) I used when I first started doing this. It's much harder and gives a very solid line, and unlike the baren it doesn't have a grain, so that changes how you use it. Also unlike the baren, it wasn't designed to be used in that position, so it leaves my right hand and wrist aching. And rather warm, because the friction of the plated steel across the back of the paper gets it hot enough to be uncomfortable.

Tomorrow, when they're dry, I'll post pictures for comparison.i

The Farce of Sodom

2009-03-28T19:00:00.003Z

Everything went well; we had a capacity crowd (in fact, some people who wanted tickets were disappointed) and plenty of enthusiastic volunteers to read.

Note to self: be more thorough about working out timings next time. Still, spending more time than expected in the pub with theatre types is always good, and the unexpected folk session afterwards was unexpected and also good.

Testing...

2009-03-17T22:23:00.001Z

Let's see if this is going to the right place.

Printer problems

2009-03-17T14:26:00.002Z

Note to self: my printer (HP Photosmart 2570) just cannot handle newsprint. It's fine with much thicker card than I'd originally expected (basically, if it'll curve and relax, it'll go through) but newsprint's too flimsy and jams about half the time.

Server move

2009-03-16T23:26:00.001Z

I'll be moving servers fairly soon; if all goes well, nothing should go noticeably wrong, or even noticeably anything.

Tove Jansson's Hobbit

2009-03-14T18:16:00.001Z

The illustrations are online here. (That link goes to the title page; there are a lot of others in the linked gallery.)

White acrylic ink

2009-03-13T17:31:00.003Z

There's something special about using white ink - I'm not quite sure what it is, but it's there. This particular ink - Daler-Rowney FW - works well on leather, which is why I originally picked it up, but of course it's ideal for black paper too. (And much less cliched than using silver ink.) This is some particularly nice handmade paper, very heavy and rough-textured, from Nepal. The design's much more open, with fewer & thinner lines, than I normally do, but I think it works.

Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery

2009-03-12T16:16:00.004Z

Theatre, and not particularly related to the visual arts, but I want to talk about it anyway and make the script public.

On the evening of the 26th of March, I'm running a play reading in Westminster Arts Reference Library - originally scheduled as part of LGBT History Month, but various exigencies meant we had to change date & venue.

Addendum: there's an open-access Facebook event here, for those of you who use Facebook. Sadly, the venue is not wheelchair accessible - it's a Victorian building with three flights of stairs, and we're at the top. It's not ideal, but it's the venue we've got.

This is in some senses a hilariously bad play, consisting mostly of entirely un-dubious language and arbitrary plot developments, and in others it's really good. It's a political satire with bisexuality and dancing demons!

The original script is here, and the PDF version I've prepared to use on the evening is here.

I prepared it using Scribus; the font is StrangeNewes, by Feòrag NicBhrìde, while the title page is done in Chapbook, also by Feòrag.

Watchmen

2009-03-12T15:16:00.002Z

Warning: contains some spoilers about character & motivation, but not plot.

The thing that struck me most about the film posters - and not just because I'm shallow - was the difference in the Silk Spectre's costume between the book and the film. Everyone else is much the same, but Laurie's totally different.

As background, Watchmen was written in 1986, and set in 1985 - Laurie Juspeczyk was born in 1949. There's a timeline here. (Warning: spoileriffic.)

The costumes code much the same basic way, as supertart - Laurie comments on the costume's stripperifficity in-universe, and of course it's a development of the original Silk Spectre's costume, which was designed specifically for Sally Jupiter to show off in with an eye to a post-heroing career.

The film version swaps cleavage for corsetry (yes, that's a corset she's wearing over the bodysuit) and soft floaty gauze for hard-edged skintight latex. She's still got the crimefighting heels, but now they're attached to long boots with, of all things, suspenders. If there's a clothing element that codes "superhooker" more than visible suspenders, I'm not sure what it is. One particularly interesting aspect is her hair - the original Spectre's hair is tucked back neatly showing that wonderful wry face and strong jaw, but the film version is practically hiding behind it, especially with that fringe. If you look at pictures of classic superheroines, they never do this - they're always out & proud.

It's the hard edges that get me, though - the costume's uncompromising, buttoned-up, effectively armoured. There's the statutory bare skin, but much less of it. She seems to project "snake" rather than the original's "bird" - I'm not sure why I get "bird" from the original, but I do. Part of the appeal of the book costume, I think, is the contrast between her cynical, funny, hard-edged character and the soft floaty hooker gear, and the film one loses that.

Che Guevara at El Alto

2009-02-19T17:35:00.003Z

Via El Gaviero - in El Alto, Bolivia, there's a seven-metre-tall statue of Che Guevara. It's just so incredibly gorgeous, and the artistic style of it is perfect. The combination of scrap steel (the detritus of industry, the broken worn-out parts of the Great Machine, reclaimed and forged into revolutionary action) and that pose (strong, impressive, protective, powerful, but still somehow having fun) is perfect. It makes a perfect counterpoint to the hard, inhuman, but still utterly, wrenchingly gorgeous metal Futurist sculptures I normally fall for.

There's another photo of it here - larger, and shows details of the construction, but I prefer the angle in the first.

Here's an article from Prensa Latina talking about the statue before it's built, and giving some detail of the symbolism.

Oh, and while I'm talking about things Bolivian - read T'anta Wawa Talks for funny, passionate, irascible Bolivian news & comment.

Snow photography

2009-02-02T11:00:00.001Z

Here's the rest of the set.

In Progress

2009-01-30T22:53:00.002Z

This isn't finished, but I like the look of it in any case, and I want to do something else based on it sometime - it looks very brass-ish.

Green & bronze dragon 1

2008-12-22T01:09:00.003Z

This is another version of the same dragon - I resized a cleaned-up version of the black & white outline I did, printed it out onto some parchment-textured paper I found in my stash, and then inked it. Literally inked, that is - the green & red are calligraphy ink, applied with a pen, but the bronze outlining is acrylic paint.

Red & gold dragon WIP

2008-12-18T14:35:00.003Z

Apologies for the rather blurry picture - today is not a good camera day for me and the tail is just slightly too long for my scanner.

Photography - chromosome contrail

2008-12-16T14:46:00.002Z

I was walking along Datchet High Street, under a flight path from Heathrow, and looked up to see this. I thought I hadn't got my camera up in time, but I just managed it.

Gandalf's Dragon - ink-only version

2008-12-11T20:01:00.002Z

This is the first stage of an attempt to illustrate the firework dragon Gandalf conjures for Bilbo's Party at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. I was inspired by these posts on Tor.com, where Kate Nepveu is blogging her Lord of the Rings re-read. I'm going to colour it, but I wanted to post the black and white version first.

Falkiner's

2008-12-10T20:21:00.003Z

Quick post to mention another good materials source.

Falkiner's (formally Shepherds Bookbinder Ltd) on Southampton Row (near Holborn) - specialist bookbinding supplies. Good paper in large quantities, thin leather of just about any description (including stingray, parrot fish, perch, and cane toad skins), and Useful Tools. They also sell good-quality lightfast pigment ink calligraphy pens, too.

They do leather scraps & offcuts at £3.50 for 100g, and they aren't stingy about what goes into the offcut box either - I picked up some very nice pieces.

High Cross 1

2008-11-20T19:25:00.001Z

I had this one sitting on my worktable for quite a while, waiting for me to cut the block after I'd sketched it out, then waiting for me to finish it. After I'd done four prints from it (all that's printed, rather than painted or drawn, is the black outlining) it took me a while to work out just what I wanted to paint, and how I wanted to decorate it.

The colour panels are acrylic paint, the details over them done with calligraphy pens.

For sale, any reasonable offer considered.