Pictures for an exhibition

The ipad drawings for the Home project continue, and the arrival of a monochrome laser printer allows me to make some little "secret" books (folded from one sheet of paper) that hold six images. Ah ... which six to put together, and in which order?

In individual prints, the manipulating of contrast and the use of different weights and colours of lines in the original provide a variety of possibilities. In the four images that are on show in the end-of-course exhibition, which were the first I printed, line thicknesses and amount of contrast are almost random ... in the eagerness (necessity) to produce something I was happy simply to have "a product". But in the feedback session of the class this week, the comment that struck me most was the subtlety that these elements, line weight and tone, contributed to the drawings, especially at the small scale. 

With that in mind, I looked at the drawings made, manipulated, and printed recently.

Lack of nuance in the sofa print

Revisiting the contrast issue

Some of the "leftover" images were used in a book structure made earlier in the course, in a mark-making session -

Last week when we set up the exhibition I put two rather hastily made books into the vitrine. They went on the bottom shelf so that you'd look down into the "room" at their centre - but looked lost in the vast space.

The new selection fills the space better -

Next step with my little pictures of Home is to translate them into lino cuts - starting with a short course next month. Looking forward to that! Meanwhile the Home drawings are being made on Saturday mornings in a coffee shop convenient to Waitrose, before the weekly grocery shopping.

The EDAM group (Extended Drawing for Artists and Makers) has a pinterest page at https://uk.pinterest.com/md301/extended-drawing-group/.

Extended drawing - small decisions

Getting work together for the end-of-course exhibition. If you're in the Holborn area on Tuesday 21 June, 6-8pm, drop in to City Lit, 3rd floor, for a glass of wine and the private view.

Using a 5cm square to assess the size of paper needed for printing onto -

 In the end, various A4 papers were on hand, which made for an easy decision in terms of size at least.

Meanwhile the digital drawings went through a couple of metamorphoses. First, collated into a sheet of squares, adjusted to be monochrome. I'm trying to make the drawings look as simple as possible, to strip their information right back - from the photograph to the selected lines of the drawing, and then presented in a simple way. This compilation is for printing out, cutting up, trying out in book form, perhaps stitched into a concertina book -

But the main work is even less complicated than that. Each image was first inverted to look like a "negative" and then printed [thanks, Mary!] at 5x5cm size on a thick, creamy paper with a bit of tooth. Five images should be enough to fill the display case -

The display cases are 115cm wide, which will accommodate five sheets, but four might look better. To be decided on Monday.

A close-up of one of the drawings -

Extended drawing - the run-up to the exhibition

Before class I had time to finish another of the Home drawings - sitting comfortably in the members' room at the British Museum (after seeing the Sicily exhibition) -

A home from home ... just like a living room, lots of books!

At class I played around with the few materials I'd taken along - 

a "room" book, two printed drawings, and some jpegs of manipulated images combining the drawings -

parts of two drawings, side by side

doubled up

flipped

(I'm thinking ahead to "wallpaper", repeating the pattern ad infinitum.)

Tracing paper and pencil to reproduce parts of an image that was showing on the ipad ... being very careful not to make it resize itself, or disappear! - 

The imprints on the cartridge paper are the result of making the dark lines on the reverse of the tracing paper, then erasing the wobbly lines from the other side. The imprint is rather faint, but it might be a useful transfer method.

An attempt to use one of the drawings to make a "room" book -

That's not terribly successful, as it stands. But could be scanned in, resized, and printed out on opaque paper.

The aim of the session was for the tutor to talk to us individually so that we knew what we'd be bringing in next week, whether it was finished work or work in progress, to put into the cases in the hall for "the exhibition", which will be put up, as a group, that evening. We have a chance to change the work on show the next Monday, before the PV on Tuesday 21st.

I had the idea of printing my digital drawings very small*, perhaps 5cm square (will have to try it out) each centred on a large sheet of paper, and it was suggested that I try printing on "nice" papers. Of course my various papers are buried under furniture etc in the flat, which is having floors and ceilings replaced at the moment, but something along those lines should be possible - once I find a printer to use (the laser printer at the flat is similarly unavailable, and Tony's lovely big printer is playing up). 

Several possibilities for printing suggest themselves:

- straight onto the nice paper, and fingers crossed the ink doesn't fall off

- onto acetate and attach the little square of print over top of the paper print if the ink does fall off

- onto acetate, cut into little squares, and attach to the pages of an accordion book (perhaps with a negative (white on black) print on the other side of each page)

- enlarging and reducing the prints on the photocopier

Also there's the possibility of using the prints of the drawings as a way of making monoprints, taking them a further step away from the computer.

But for next week, only a set of tiny prints on nice big sheets of paper - four or five - are needed.

*With the small prints, the idea is that people have to move closer to them to see them - and this "gesture of approach" involves the viewer physically in looking at the works. That might be almost as good as being able to pick them up?

On the theoretical level, an article about "what is home" here.

Extended drawing - small ideas

Last Monday I set out some ideas for "working at home" as there was no class, thanks to a bank holiday. Sorry to say, I've followed up on none of those - but did come up with something different.

Sitting in a coffee shop, to get out of the house and out of the cold weather (temps in low teens, and grey, grey skies all week), I had no book with me to read but did have the ipad. On which were photos of various rooms of the house. I put one into Brushes Redux and started tracing the edges of things -

I had forgotten most what we learned at the "drawing with the ipad" course last year, and stuck with different widths of line and a few colours. Each colour was on a separate layer, as I wanted to try inverting the colours or changing them in some other way. Or maybe making them monochrome.

The drawing and its layers

Layer 4 inverted - the reddish-blue becomes a yellowy-beige

Over the next few days, and in a variety of coffee shops, I did a few more of these drawings -

Tony's computer desk, with view into the garden

The shelf near the sink and its collection of small objects
- which, over 22 years in this house, I'd never looked at closely

Those bird houses

Now the challenge is to get them sized (big? tiny?) and printed out - for some reason the printer feeds the paper right through and says "Paper out" although there's plenty of paper in the feeder. Frustrating or what...

While I've been writing this post, I've done a few of the things on last week's list.

Small, quick drawings of a dozen objects -

They include the wrapped soaps in the bathroom, the stopped clock, various lights, and unread books.

Moving the bird house around and photographing it -

Oddly enough, this did lead to a few half-formed ideas ... something for later perhaps. Ideas about the environment of the dwelling ... about being in the right place. Birds would need the house to be at the right height and away from a human dwelling. (And sometimes it - or the occupant - doesn't fit in - home as non-home.) Also a few thoughts about appropriate adornment. Half-formed and small ideas.

Extended drawing - small ideas

Last Monday I set out some ideas for "working at home" as there was no class, thanks to a bank holiday. Sorry to say, I've followed up on none of those - but did come up with something different.

Sitting in a coffee shop, to get out of the house and out of the cold weather (temps in low teens, and grey, grey skies all week), I had no book with me to read but did have the ipad. On which were photos of various rooms of the house. I put one into Brushes Redux and started tracing the edges of things -

I had forgotten most what we learned at the "drawing with the ipad" course last year, and stuck with different widths of line and a few colours. Each colour was on a separate layer, as I wanted to try inverting the colours or changing them in some other way. Or maybe making them monochrome.

The drawing and its layers

Layer 4 inverted - the reddish-blue becomes a yellowy-beige

Over the next few days, and in a variety of coffee shops, I did a few more of these drawings -

Tony's computer desk, with view into the garden

The shelf near the sink and its collection of small objects
- which, over 22 years in this house, I'd never looked at closely

Those bird houses

Now the challenge is to get them sized (big? tiny?) and printed out - for some reason the printer feeds the paper right through and says "Paper out" although there's plenty of paper in the feeder. Frustrating or what...

While I've been writing this post, I've done a few of the things on last week's list.

Small, quick drawings of a dozen objects -

They include the wrapped soaps in the bathroom, the stopped clock, various lights, and unread books.

Moving the bird house around and photographing it -

Oddly enough, this did lead to a few half-formed ideas ... something for later perhaps. Ideas about the environment of the dwelling ... about being in the right place. Birds would need the house to be at the right height and away from a human dwelling. (And sometimes it - or the occupant - doesn't fit in - home as non-home.) Also a few thoughts about appropriate adornment. Half-formed and small ideas.

Extended drawing - last week's output

With nearly three hours of class time to fill, working on my Home project, what to do? House plans have fascinated me since childhood, when we had lots of home-building magazines around (my father built his own house three times over). Looking at the layouts in the magazines, I could imagine our family living in those houses - and most important, which would be my room, and how I would furnish it. No surprise, then, that a plan of the house that I currently call home started taking shape -

It's interesting to mentally walk round the house and try to envisage how the doors (red) opened (to the left? to the right?) and where the shelves and cupboards (yellow) are. The windows emanated green ... a bridge to the garden.

To do the upstairs at the same scale I folded the paper and traced the outline, changing as necessary.

Then added text -- the names of the rooms, and some salient features (eg, functional fireplace).

Meanwhile everyone was quietly getting on with things ...

The next bit of creative frippery was based on seeing this collage at Art16; name of artist escapes me. The cutout lines float over the background -

So I had to try cutting out something - words - from scrap paper. The words were written with white chalk on white paper, which could be seen at certain angles to the light, seen well enough to use as a cutting guide -

That was "just playing", though I might use it as a way of doing line drawings of furniture or other objects. Loosely positioned, it starts to be 3d and cast shadows.

There was still some time left to fill (I felt very unfocussed, can you tell?) so I indulged in a bit of smearing with chalky pastel on a big sheet of paper, using crude shapes and then the back of the cut-out words -

This is an offshoot of the rubbed-down charcoal last week, from which a pattern emerged. Ah, lovely serendipity! The artist's job is to notice what's happening, and take it further. So, we can all do the artist's job, now and then.

Today is bank holiday monday - no class this week. I shall try to use the time - 5 hours including travel time, much could be done in that span - following up a few ideas:
- move the birdhouse around the house and take photographs
- do small, quick line drawings of a dozen objects
- large bold line drawings (furniture?) - cut out, hung up, lit to bring out shadows
- 3D objects from the cut-out lines??

Extended drawing (is it for the birds?)

Later today, before class, I am to have a tutorial and, given the distinct lack of work done outside class, and the still-woolly nature of my topic, I'm dreading it.  However - perhaps these are the very circumstances in which a tutorial can be most helpful! 

Let's start with last week's class. I'd photographed the bird houses and put them outside the gate for people to take -

then drew them (big) with conte and charcoal -

and captured some very crazy - whimsical, even - thoughts about birds bedded down in feather duvets in the privacy of the birdhouse, rather than exposed in nests -

One of the sheets of paper had a tear, which made a door in the book/house structure - I saved that "for later" and started with the smaller pieces -

This fold-awayable, open-upable, inside/outside book structure is my go-to option at the moment. Why fight it? Much can be done with a sheet of paper and a few folds!

Nests inside (with a very dark area at the centre ... rather like the dark hole where the birds enter, or disappear) ...  On the outside, using an eraser to take away the charcoal. Not really "nests", more like strange spidery things...

Underneath is a pattern of negative spaces from rubbing away the excess charcoal before using the rubber to draw with -

Once I noticed what was happening, I was a bit more careful about where the paper got put for the next bit of wiping-off. I like the way it almost looks like a pile of papers, and their shadows.

But how does it work in combination with the book/house structures ...

Research, still. Pootling about. Not getting anywhere much, just at the moment. 

Too much thinking, not enough doing...

But nice to get feedback from last time, attached to the sheet of "aims and objectives" we fill out at the beginning of each session -

More to think about.

Meanwhile, one of the birdhouses didn't get taken to a new home, so I'm keeping it, for now anyway -

Seeing it in the photo makes me wonder where else it might comfortably sit ...