Bike ride in Annecy

Here comes the photographer

Our rental bikes

At 10am the end of the lake is misty

Lawnmowing was going on - an uphill job

The sound of cowbells!

Moving to a different pasture - with the help of sheepdogs (cowdogs?)

So peaceful!

Spot the "castle" (this is at Duingt, a medieval hamlet) - there's another one down at the lakeside

Into ...

... and through the tunnel, where once train tracks ran

Remembering the days of the train line

Autumn on the lake

 This was the highlight of the holiday, especially those cowbells and the diligent dogs helping to keep them in line. It was lovely to cycle away from the traffic, under the autumnal trees. We didn't have a a map and found out later we'd been almost to the end of the track, the end of the lake. With quite a bit of stopping for photography, and for lunch, we got the bikes back within the half-day time slot - certainly the longest ride either of us had been on for years, if not decades.

Watching and listening

Countdown to the book fair

Seven working days to go, and here's what's on hand and in progress. Some _boxes to be ticked!

_The dictionary stands are yet to be made (by my Domestic Carpenter).

_The list of pigments that will line the broken spine of the colour dictionary is yet to be formatted and printed.

_A loose section in the colour dictionary needs to be sewn.

The Paint Chart is ready for _formatting, _printing, and lots of _gluing -

All the colour strips are ready!

I hope to get three copies made, in an edition of five.

23 thaumatropes are ready - they'll be more interesting if sold in pairs: by holding them together and twirling both at once, four combinations of colours are possible -

To get an even number, I'll _make a few more in the colours that are in short supply.

_The thaumatropes need envelopes or bags.

Four decks of "marked cards" are ready -

and another two "just" need a _top coat, the colourful one (the base coat of white has been done).

_The cards need boxes making - adding paint makes them a very tight fit in the original boxes.

And a new item, arising from all the paint colours that didn't match the colour on the dictionary page. The idea is to _make a fan book that will spread into a rainbow of colours, but some of the painted papers aren't stiff enough. What could be glued on the back? ... how about bits of maps?

The working title for these books is "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and I haven't decided how many pages or quite how to fasten them together. At least I've found the paper punch for making the hole! This seems quite straightforward in comparison to the paint chart ... I'm looking forward to finishing the paint chart and getting on with the fan books.

_They'll need an envelope or something too.

Lots of book-work still to do. And _gathering cloths for the table, that sort of thing. It's been a while since I've had a stand at a book fair so I no longer have all the gubbins assembled ready for action.

Process, procedure ... project

The project has the working title Paint Chart - it's to be based on a Farrow & Ball chart and requires lots of paint "chips". Oh my, what have I bitten off with this one ... more than I can chew in the time remaining, perhaps! 

Finding the 48 colours is well underway - about 36 are now cut to size and bagged up -

The numbers denote the page that the colour came from - no, it wasn't a matter of cutting up the page, but of mixing colour till it matched, which sometimes took several tries -

Matches for some of the near-misses might be, have been, found elsewhere in the dictionary.

When a page has been matched and "chipped", it gets a marker -

I'm aiming to get a good distribution not just of colours but of letters of the alphabet ... that earlier section needs attention, not much going on there yet.

(You can see the sad state of disrepair of the book. Still thinking about how to deal with that.)

The page number, and headwords, get entered into a Notes file and I type in the definitions from last-century's dictionary -

It's almost time to do a layout for the printed part of the chart. I dread to think of what pitfalls there may be in that ... onward and upward!

While painting and cutting I've been catching up on episodes of Inside Science - the one with listeners' questions was particularly good - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06c0cj5 - and there are many more on the Radio 4 website.

ohmigawd it's Thursday!

... and that means poetry! As the neighbourhood whizzes and pops with fireworks - it's Guy Fawkes today - and municipal fireworks displays at the weekend, it's hard to feel poetical.

So let's have some "poetry in action" - performance poetry - competitive performance poetry, by kids in a programme of "slam", in which schools in New York City compete, practising via video links -

Watch the video here. Inspiring stuff.

Idle browsing

To go with your cup of tea, you pull a book off the shelf and spend a few minutes flipping through, looking at the pictures...

This was in "Art Made Modern: Roger Fry's Vision of Art", and it captivated me -

Andre Derain, 1914, Picasso's House at Avignon

Or you're looking for something specific on the internet, and scroll and scroll ... then rather than finding what you were looking for, something else marvellous appears ...

This was in among a search for Japanese woodblock printing tools -

Negishi Japan, 1916, by Charles W Bartlett

Or you have a quick look at a short video and one thing leads to another and you find yourself watching a whole series...

... for instance the woodblock cutting and printing videos by David Bull, especially the "Ukiyo-e heroes - taking favourite video game heroes and putting them back in the ukiyo-e style" and the Great Wave series - they are available here -

A day in the studio

In quest of the much-needed paper punch, which has spent years in a desk drawer but has inexplicably disappeared from that spot, I started the studio day by turning out a few drawers, discarding a few things, rearranging, adding labels ... which used up half the morning - and still no paper punch ...

However it did turn up, in a box that has sat for months in plain view on the shelf above the work table. Also in that box were the other bookbinding tools I've been looking for for some weeks, off and on (mostly off).

On with the work - mixing pale and neutral colours and painting papers -

 Lots of neutrals. What for? to simulate paint charts -

My somewhat complicated idea is to do a riff on Farrow & Ball paint charts, using much the same sequence of colours, neutrals first, then reds, etc - and their "names" will be the headwords on the painted dictionary pages. This will involve finding 48 colours, mixing to match the colour on the appropriate dictionary page, painting paper, cutting strips and gluing them on the "chart", which will have been printed with the colour names, ie the headwords, eg mien - militia (as on the beige page above). On the back, emulating F&B's explications of paint colours, will be definitions of these headwords, arranged alphabetically; the definitions will come from the red dictionary, Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (no publication date), which belonged to Phyllis C. Banks, who got it in October 1924. (The dictionary of the same title, which I painted, was published in 1983.)

I feel quite daunted by this plan; writing it down helps, and so does my stash of papers painted with leftover paints, which has yielded a few strips -

Only 36 more colours to find! As well as finding word definitions (48x2 of them), and laying the whole thing out in Indesign for printing. It's doable in the time available, but I'm not thinking yet of the cutting of strips and the gluing into place. Or wondering whether this book-object will have any appeal. It's already come a long way during a day of actually starting to make it - I've figured out how to choose the pages and colours, and reconciled myself to having to paint lots of paper (for the strips), and made the decision to use 48 colours (eight panels) instead of just the four panels.

Drawing Tuesday - on the ipad

Filling the small sketchbook bought specially for the trip to Annecy didn't exactly go according to plan, but evenings at the flat were a good time to do some ipad drawing, based on photos taken during the day. (Mind you, it didn't happen every day!)

One drawing started with the pattern on an 18th century chest in the castle museum -

I used many layers - first to outline the shapes -

 Then with a wider brush to colour in, using traditional paint colours

 Done?

Not quite - some darker lines make a difference - as does the position of the layer, under rather than over the coloured layers -

A natural subject, crabapples; the opacity is reduced so that the drawn lines can be seen (these are too thin)  -

The real leaves didn't look right, nor do these fantasy leaves -

The "dynamic" features in Brushes are used for the little starry bits on the crabapples.

Next, using the motif as a repeat, and erasing the fill-colour layer to reveal it -

I'm loving the "creative tracing" and finding a few things that work for me. I've certainly learned the importance of checking that you're working on the intended layer, and am also finding some things that would be easier in Photoshop or Indesign than in Brushes, but that's by the by.

Keeping a record of experiments, eg what happens when you change the parameters for different kinds of brushes -

More drawings -

Traced from a photo

Playing with colour

(This post is linked to Off The Wall Friday.)

Medieval meets modern in Annecy

Complementary colour chart

Since the "drawing on the ipad" course two weeks ago I've been practising (will show some results ... eventually!) and have also discovered other uses for the Brushes app at least.

For instance, it has a useful colour wheel for choosing colours, and it has an "Invert colours" function that you can apply to the current layer. I needed to find the complementary shade to some paints in tubes, and guesswork was getting me nowhere.

Matching a colour on paper to a colour on screen requires a bit of guesswork too, it turned out.

Here are my best efforts for matching cobalt blue and ultramarine; the ultramarine match isn't all that good...

More daubs of colour, more scribbles to try them out, and a chart of each of the colours and its opposite number, which was found through inverting the colours and using the colour picker to move the complementary from the screen into the chart.

Both versions contain some of my paint colours, and the inverse of others, all mixed up.

 One can, of course, be systematic and tidy!

The final version was prepared by taking screen shots of the two versions, putting them into a new layer, and labelling the paint colours -

Added bonus: I discovered that by zooming in to about 480% it's possible to write quite neatly with a fingertip - the line stays 5 pixels wide, and at that amount of zoom it's as wide as your finger!

Three in one

This photo recalls three of the things I liked about Annecy:
- the many interesting combinations of women and their dogs
- the crosswalks, where cars stopped for pedestrians ... so civilised!
- Monoprix - its name written unostentaciously in red - a grocery store we visited daily

A fourth thing - the arcaded shapes of the architecture, and the colours ... almost venetian?