blog.NewTangled.com

I am becoming increasingly interested in Graffiti and street art. The free-form wanderings, automatic doodling and dada-ism appeal.

Multi-zoomorph Keith Haring Tribute

Here is a negative of a sketch I produced during my holiday in Greece. I started out aiming to create a Multi-Zoomorph knot from a surfing manoeuvre sequence. I saw a set of pictures of Kelly Slater riding his ‘Wizard Sleeve’ self shaped surfboard.

Incidentally he named this board because of it’s looseness (someone’s been watching Borat!)

As the picture evolved I worked over the rider outlines, in the back of my mind this was suggesting the style of Keith Haring.

Haring was a trained artist and was caught up in the Graffiti turf wars in the Bronx, late 70’s. He started painting his distinctive figures on blank advertising hoardings in the subway. Sometimes his design would be a couple of low key figures, other times the work would fill the available space. He wanted to reflect the bustle of city life, dance, African art and the language of the street. Word.

I recently won a couple of commissions to design tattoo’s. One was pure Celtic waves based on my art, the other, a design of a Zombie surfer pin-up in the Style of Jim Philips! I couldn’t make it up eh? Probably the most fun brief I’ve ever been given.

Anyway, as a treat, and to try and break some artists block, I bought some cans of spray paint to play about in this medium. There’s only one way to go… Jump on in! Here’s my first attempt at a free hand knot in spray paint (on MDF).

Spray can Celtic Wave

Dabbling in this really makes me appreciate the skill it takes to produce a fluent crisp peice of work such as this (photograpphed on my recent trip to Athens):

Athens Graffiti

I suspected it took some practice… expect to see a few more of these in coming blogs!

More commissions are always welcome and any art you see on this site is available for sale, drop me a line!

Links:
haring.com Keith Haring Foundation Official Website

monstercolours.com Monster Colours Spray Can Vendor Website

Here are two more images produced from the sketch I posted in my blog a couple of days ago… the palette is from Colourlovers and is called ’sandywater’ … it instantly made me think of those dredging low tide waves churning the sand up, colouring the waves.

The original Palette is here:
www.colourlovers.com/palette/726905/sandywater

Hope you like this… it’s a single line and I was working on the principles of angular vectors to show the structure of the wave. Also this represents it’s movement.

The original sketch included a surfer in the tube, removing him has left an interlacing error as originally it was intended that he would be entwined with the wave…. perhaps you can spot the switch in the pattern? To me this switch doesn’t matter, it’s been found in ancient master pieces, works completed by apprentices and occasionally become unavoidable in some designs. That’s what I’m sticking to anyway!!

The paint drips effect was created with a picture tube I made in Paintshop.

Any questions just ask…

Also note this painting is available for sale, please contact me for details or refer to my price list pricelist. Cheers!

Happy new year to you!!

Here’s a picture from my Christmas Sketch Book….

It’s inspired by street art pieces and so I paintshopped this picture transforming it into a street art piece on a wrecked boat by the Seven Bretheren causeway, Barnstaple… more to come on this subject before long…

Paintshopped Piece

The North Winds are blowing and have pretty well kept me indoors this weekend. 

Zoe and I went to see the Abram Games (1914-96) retrospective at the Burton Art Gallery, Bideford, yesterday.  Games was an important British Graphic Designer, reinventing the British poster whilst working for the war effort.  It’s striking stuff, iconic and bold.  He had an adroit method for creating visual puns, and was a highly skilled life artist.  Games collected thousands of photos through his career, as reference material, but prided himself in redrawing everything so as to convey exactly what he wanted. 

My favorite thing about Abe Games was that he insisted on complete control of his projects, would submit a single final image to the client.  He greeted criticism by suggesting they hire another person for the job!

Also showing was the Annual Open Christmas Exhibition, our favorite piece was ‘The People Factory’ by Jay Luttman-Johnson.

Tuck In (Rough)

Inspired and spurred on this is a sketch I started while hanging around Atlantic Village, avoiding crimbo shopping :-)  and finished with a few beers last night :-) 

It’s based on a picture from ‘The Surfers Path’ of Alan Stokes tucking into a wave down in west Cornwall.  I chose the picture because of the way the wave is enveloping the surfer, embedding him into the wave which lends itself to embedding a Zoomorph into a knot.  This morning I photographed the sketch and coloured it on the pooter. 

FYI I used the following steps:

1. Split colour channel (to eliminate most of the construction lines from the image)
2. Adjust Brightness and contrast
3. Some touching up
4. Make selections and save to Alpha Channels
5. Coloured with large semi opaque brush strokes
6. Blurred

I like the Graffiti style, the bands are chunky and angular.  Where I’ve made my selections crudely it looks like scratch graff through the paint.  I want to do more with this image… watch this space..

Bideford Burton Art Gallery: http://www.burtonartgallery.co.uk/

Abram Games: http://www.abramgames.com/

Jay Luttman-Johnson: No reb reference available… if know please comment so I can add

Please note my art is for sale, 10% goes to SAS, please view my gallery to see more celtic surf art for sale.

Knot within a Knot Coloured Sketch

 

I came across a site a few weeks back called colourlovers.com.

It’s a social networking site for Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen types.  The idea is you use its COPASO or basic colour tool, create a colour palette, publish it and share it with other artsy members of the community. 

It’s the kind of idea that if someone explained it to you as their “great idea” you might think their cheese was sliding off their cracker.  And yet it’s a great tool and quite fun. 

The last time I was on there someone published a palette:

Luton, England

Made me laugh and without stopping to think I wrote a comment

That’s hilarious, Lutons a hole!!

Turns out it was posted by a Polish bloke, he commented back on my wall:

Knowle is a small village on the road between Braunton and Ilfracombe

OK, bit of a strange comment maybe??  So I wrote back saying I meant no offence, he explained

Maybe Luton is a hole, but this English town is still important for me and many Poles - the airport is there!

Still a bit confused but all seems to be OK as now we’re ‘lovers’ (of each other palettes).  The Internet can be a strange place sometimes. 

Anyway, here is the Palette I designed yesterday:

Colour Lovers Palette

Colour Lovers Pallette ‘Night Surfing’

I chose the colours for this palette based on a photo by Al Mackinnon in and old copy of the Surfers Path (May/June 08).  The picture’s of Devon Surfer Chris Clarke taking off on a Scottish wave at sundown.

I’ve then taken these colours and used them to paint my sketchbook drawing of a knot within a knot; I designed the knot above a while back (more details in this blog entry: http://blog.newtangled.com/2008/11/sketchbook-knot-underwater-photo/)

The painting was done in Paint Shop Pro 6, and I used roughly the following steps:

1. Cut photo of sketch and rotate
2. Increase brightness and contrast
3. Make Grayscale
4. Further increase contrast
5. Make ‘16 Million’ colours again
6. Use ‘Magic Wand’ selector to select sections (adjusting RGB tolerance between 15-25 to help it select the sections I wanted)
7. Use a normal round brush and opacities between 75% and 100% (as I was aiming for a really strong bold look close to the palette I chose)
8. Paint is fast sweeping strokes
9. Apply a blur filter to smooth the hard edges resulting from using a high opacity paint.

Bobs your uncle… Its given the image a really bold look and bleed / masked effects similar to a silk screen print over gutta.  The painting has a really psychedelic look, and I suppose this relates to the art Nouveau look which has relations to the forms found in Celtic knots.  I think the sweeping air-brush type strokes have kept close with the graffiti street art style too.

 

Underwater wave photo with Celtic knot overlay

I’ve been playing about with paint-shop pro again and taking some of my old sketches and trying manipulate them and see what I can do.  Tonight I used a sketch I did a couple of years back when I was on a flight back from Vegas after a conference.   ’The fantastic 4′ movie was on (total rubbish), I couldn’t sleep and was properly hung over, the buffet champagne breakfast is a stupid idea.  Some fatty business guy had slipped off his shoes and bagged most of the row of seats.  I really wanted to sleep but couldn’t, so I drew a wave knot for most of the long flight home. 

The idea I had was to put a Celtic knot within a knot, I did the drawing in a little A5 notebook, so it’s a pretty tight space to work in.  

Knot in a knot sketchbook photo

1. I took my ‘3 simple curls design’ and drew it out with nice fat bands. 
2. I then divided these bands into 3 and marked dots at equal intervals along the 3 lines within the original knot.  This formed the grid for the inner knot. 
3. I applied a simple repeating unit to this grid to form a network within the knot.  I counted up the number of units to make sure it would be a single line.
4. I thickened the network of the inner knot and the outer lines of the ’super’ knot
5. I tried out interlacing but it wouldn’t work… why? 

By now it’s like 6am and I’ve been up for 20 hours of something stupid like that!

It didn’t work because the thickened lines forming the ’super’ knot edges are not a single or continuous entity entangled with the inner knot.  To the single knot it’s just like having random short lines crossing it’s network.  This means when you come to interlace the knot there’s not an equal number of overs and unders so you get interlacing errors.  Doh.  Oh well still looks pretty cool, I was still happy with the design, it looks complex and has a nice shape. 

I was thinking the inner knot could be painted like the foam that colours the face of a wave when a second wave breaks closer to the shore than the first.  Patterns within patterns kind of thing.

Anyway the paint shop work I did was as follows:

1. Photo the sketch
2. Adjust lightness and contrast
3. Airbrush out some shadows and unwanted pencil marks
4. Reduce to grey scale
5. Re adjust contrast
6. Paste as layer over a random picture I took from under a breaking wave (at Putsborough… AKA slush-borough)
7. Deformed the layer to make bigger
8. Set to about 50% opacity
9. Made the layer a ‘burn’ layer

I think it has a quite nice smokey effect… will probably try and make some other effects soon, it’s been fun using this old design… it took me away from a pretty rubbish flight I suppose that’s the beauty of pencil and paper over paint shop pro!!