Category Archives: Creativity

Setting up shop, episode 2.

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King of corners sample print.

You will have read in my last post that things have started to come together for the opening of the small internet shop for Soulcraftcandy where you will be able to purchase high quality prints of some of the drawings. I thought it might be interesting to write a little bit about the journey to this point so far.

So how are things going? Well, not too bad actually. Whoever you seek advice from in these matters, like in most cases in life really, you will receive plenty of information. All advice is good, you just have to work out which bits are most relevant to your course of action and use most of it to guide your decisions rather than slavishly following one point of view or another. Such was the case with the choice for which on-line retail supplier to go with. As it turned out, once this decision had been made, loads of other stuff seemed to fall into place as adhering to a given format or template made decision making much, much easier. There were some things though that remained outside of this comfortably convenient arrangement.

I know from many years selling design ideas to clients that although a concept may be brilliant, how others perceive it can be heavily effected by how you present the idea. In a sense the beauty of the presentation must be as wonderful as the idea contained within it, in order for it to gain maximum impact. Thus I knew that the quality of any prints I would be offering would have to be very high. I’d heard about giclee printing before, in fact I bought a print by another artist last year, it’s an impressive process. the challenge was to find a giclee printer in London who would take on my work. With a bit of research I’ve found one, and I think our relationship will be a good one. I chose him for all the usual good reasons but what really swung it for me was how I felt when entering his studio for the first time, it was immaculate. No offcuts or waste anywhere and spotless equipment. If ever there was a place which strongly adhered to the adage of “ a place for everything, and everything in its place”, this was it. The part of me that likes a tidy workshop and a box of clean, well kept tools was very happy. I ordered some sample prints from him and they are lovely.

The one at the top of this post is enlarged to A2 size from the original A3 format. I wanted to see what would happen to the line work and the drawing as a whole at an increased scale. I’m more than pleased with the result and this size will be offered in the store alongside the original A3 size for all prints. It’s almost as if I drew it originally at this size and after a bit of fiddling with saturation levels and such like, the image prints beautifully. Biro ink is not unusual in that the black is actually made up of lots of other pigments. As a result, when you digitise an image it often has a hue about it which can be perhaps blue or purple in nature. This can be difficult to control if you’re printing straight off, so a bit of careful adjustment is always required to get balance right.

King of corners sample print at A3

This print at the bottom is the A3 size. I clipped a business card to the board to give some idea of relative scales. And please excuse any discolouring in the photos. Even on a bright sunny day the camera seems to make up its own mind about light levels. You can though see the door of my shed, a small but meaningful space often used for moments of creative alchemy.

Sidecars, an unexpected delight.

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Sidecar No.1

Those of you who have been visiting the blog over the last few weeks and months will have heard me mention on more than one occasion that it’s a bit of a habit to be working on more than one thing at a time. You will also be familiar with my list keeping that helps to organise the workflow and assist in prioritising the order in which things happen. You would think, perhaps rightly, that these two things would conspire to keep the imagination fully fueled from now until some point in the distant future, and generally you would be correct. But sometimes a proverbial “curve ball” comes in from nowhere and changes the game plan completely.

 

On this occasion the disruptive little agent of change came calling whilst sat on a bench in a local park. I was deep into the Cafe Racer series and pretty sure what I was going to be doing next. It wasn’t a particularly nice day to be lost in a reverie on a park bench but that moment of free thinking just threw this word at me: Sidecars. I reached for my trusty A6 Moleskine notebook and made two very quick sketches which are shown below. No notes were made, just these two little scamps.

Back in the studio, pen hit lining paper with a rare intensity and within a very short space of time I had the bare bones of a much larger drawing, the big one at the top of this page. It’s rare to find myself able to work this fast, or this accurately, straight to paper. But knowing these moments don’t always come voluntarily lends them an exciting urgency which is best served by going with it for as long as it lasts. The drawing was “finished” the following morning, in the sense that it had reached the point where adding any more would have spoiled it.

 

It’s fantastic when this kind of thing happens. It’s so easy to get sucked into a situation where a schedule that you’ve created in an effort to ease any anxiety about what to do next becomes constraining, is actively removing flexibility from your working. It’s a psychological thing as much as a practical one obviously, and you’re never really tied to your plan, but it’s there to give you purpose. The unexpected game changers are great because if you’re open enough to engage them when they occur, you quickly realise that as important as it is to have a plan, it’s equally important to have the courage  and ability to change that plan and not be a prisoner of it.

 

Go with the flow, and see where it takes you………….

 

 

Perseverance rewarded.

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Street Racing No.2

You don’t have to look far across the walls of the studio here, or delve too far into one of the sketchbooks lying about, to find a list. Lists of drawings to do, subject areas to take a closer look at, details to get images of and compositions to work up into something meaningful. Lots of lists and so always seemingly masses to do. Visiting a list at the end of a project hopefully kick starts the creative muscle at a time when all it really wants to do is take a break.

 

The latest visit has yielded the above drawing which has been sitting rather unloved in a large pad that spends most of its time being moved around to make room for other things. Such is the way of small rooms and large flat things. Anyway, it has sat there patiently waiting for its moment of glory, inclusion in a post in it’s final form. It’s called Street Racing No.2, following on from a previous drawing, done in a style I rather casually refer to as scribbling. It needed finishing off. Drawn pretty much directly onto the page over a very vague pencil layout, this technique involves a very light touch with the pen, working around the image in a very sketchy and indeterminate way.  It builds the picture very slowly and is without a doubt very time consuming. This is one of those methods that really tests your resolve to finish the piece, to persevere and get to the end knowing you’ve chosen this path yourself. Yes I know this is a relatively small drawing, but it does provide an insight into what working at a much larger scale involves in terms of focus and momentum.

 

Perhaps that’s why I haven’t undertaken any more of these recently. This one is spread across a sheet of A2 paper in landscape format. This is a lovely scale for a drawing but brings with it a firm refusal to fit onto the scanner bed in any orientation, even breaking it into sections. Hence this view is a bit lacking in some of the finer detail as I had to shoot it with the camera and fiddle about quite a lot in Photoshop.

 

So that’s another item to cross off one of the lists, but it’s already prompted the addition of another item on another; do something about a lighting set up to enable better photos of larger pieces, or get a bigger scanner……..