Screenprints #2

Here is a scan of my screenprinted postcards that I made yesterday in a bright Cheltenham yellow colour. I will pack them up into wee bags of 5 and attempt to sell them.

Giclée Prints and Screen Printed postcards #1

I have been working on doing a series of prints to display and hopefully sell at the Festival Preview event which I have a table at on the 7th March. I narrowed down the drawings to just over 20 which I thought might work as prints roughly A4 - A3 in size:

I printed these out on the MFD and narrowed down further to about 15. I wanted the prints to be mounted ready for framing and found a local company Cotswold Mounts who cut mounts to standard and custom sizes and also supply backing boards and bags. I ordered just over 30 of these and have prepared the files to the correct sizes for fitting into the mount frames. These I plan to print at Hardwick at the first opportunity.

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I also wanted to do some postcards but, having had a look through various websites offering postcards decided I'd rather do some myself, which I may yet regret given the time I don't have. Rather than going for more Giclee I decided to use some of the line drawings I'd done in the earlier stages of this project and go for some screen printed postcards which would allow me to spend some quality time in the print room.

The line drawings are all of characters from the course and I decided to add in a spot colour - I initially thought yellow as this is associated with Cheltenham racecourse with the yellow scarves at Festival time etc. I used some background elements from other drawings I'd done to form the colour layer as well as putting in some block tone in photoshop. Here are the designs I came up with:

Having shown these to a few people and received good feedback I went ahead and prepared them for screen which involved shrinking them down to A6 size - I'm afraid they will be a little small for my liking but I can always come back and make larger ones. A6 is also standard postcard size and will allow me to put them in proper sized bags for selling. Here is an example of the design for the screen: 

Actually, this one looks quite good in b/w: 

I will get some thick paper from Hardwick tomorrow and hopefully crack on with printing them in the evening. I can do a letterpress of this blog address and my name and email on the back afterwards.

Horse Drawings

As it has been recognised that my horses are fairly sketchy to say the least, I have endeavoured to do some horse drawing practice on various occasions. At some point in the future I may pluck up the courage to approach a riding school or even a trainer to ask if I can go and draw some of their horses in the flesh. I don't plan on making horses the focus of the project in any sense but, ye'know, it might help if I could draw them a bit better, like. So I did some basic anatomy studies from a few animal and horse drawing books to help especially with the legs and movement, which is where I've found the drawings tend to go haywire.

I'll carry on with these like as ye' can see I've barely cracked it at all. Horses legs are a damned hard thing to draw and no mishtake.

stencil colour experiment

A couple of experiments using paper stencils and gouache colour - applied with paper tissue in absence of a sponge! Might be a useful technique for applying colour to drawings in future.

Literature Festival 2/ The Tent

More sketchbook drawing of the Literature Festival, and also our Small Press Fair in the Uni Glos tent. Again, with some of these drawings I had a go at colouring - the books in the signing I drew really were a lurid, spangly purple colour:

 

I also put a skyline in behind this page of character studies, and added some colour (again, his jumper really was that green): 

I thought I'd include a photo (not mine) of the festival to compare. I did find that during busy times it was very difficult to draw as people really did move through the thoroughfare very fast: 

These drawings were done in the Cafe, but I rather boshed the composition, and so did a bit of editing, which is possibly interesting: 

Really, this brutal colouring has got to stop. I tried to get the little girl as she shovelled cake into her mouth: 

Finally, drawings of Andrew, Georgina, Iselle, Emma and Andrew again! From our tent: 

Pet Stall framing experiment

I was digging through some old drawings the other day when I came across this discarded picture of a pet stall in Mitcham, south London, done about two summers ago. First, I coloured the drawing in on the photoshop and then was unfavourably comparing it to a drawing of a similar topic by the illustrator George Butler: 

IMAGE GOES HERE WHEN YOU GET A IT

I thought that despite there being a fair bit of detail in my drawing and also some decent character in there is something that doesn't work somehow and it has something to do with composition. The composition is essentially a horizontal rectangle, possibly not very interesting. Butler's has more of a diagonal feel to it. 

I decided to try and circumvent this by framing off certain parts of the drawing, to see if reducing the scope and changing the composition would help with how the drawing works. The ones I tried are below: 

1: This just takes the side left of the image, like we are looking through a doorway, or perhaps some other market stalls.

2: This cuts out the whole bottom and right and just leaves the stall sign. 

3: The two characters I like the most are the two stall hands watching the conversation from the left. 

4: This just focuses on the five central figures. 

I would say I like 1 and 3; they have a sense of quiet observation to them. 

Thoughts: 

1: Perhaps try to implement framing during live drawing

2: Have sketchbook pages with frames pre-drawn onto them? 

Colouring things in

One of the things I have been doing over the last few weeks is working with some old drawings and adding colour in with photoshop. I could try and put that in more poetic English but really that has been the extent of it. In the near future when we have a bit more time to experiment during the week I hope to try some stencil colour techniques and maybe even down the line some more advanced print techniques with screen printing etc. However, in the short-term this will have to do. 

This is a drawing from a while ago I did in Ronnie Scott's jazz club of some people leaning against the bar, talking (the bottom image): 

I played around a bit and came up with this: 

This ended up going into the centre-spread of my Jazz Drawings booklet!!

I was quite pleased with this image as I feel it doesn't intrude with the line in the drawing and gives a sense of scene and time of day - this emphasises the evening/night-time setting quite well I feel. 

The colours are very flat which may be something to consider in future. I would also say that there is a fair bit of Feliks Topolski in this usage of flat colour which he used to do with his screen prints - see below:

Felix Topolski, Westminster 1973

The other drawing I worked with was of my favourite cricketer Chris Gayle at a match I went to over the summer. This is even more brutally coloured than the first, although in defence it isn't inappropriate as the West Indies kit is a truly bold shade of maroon with lurid blue trimmings: 

Thoughts: 

1: Try some print techniques in future

2: Try scanning some hand-drawn colour (watercolour, crayon etc) to work with in photoshop to lessen the 'flatness' of the colour

3: Introduce some collage elements

4: Work manually with a lightbox and maybe some photocopies of drawings etc. 

Nosferatu at the track

In a similar vein to my previous post, one of the things I did early on was to play around with one of the drawings I did of the racecourse and introduce an alien element - a drawing of a rather sinister-looking racegoer: 

He looks like Max Shreck from Nosferatu. I gave the scene a red sky. All very scary.