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

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.

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!!

Spray Fan 1 (detail)

The image posted shows a detail of the surfer performing a hardcore cutback… this was inspired by a pic I saw in September 2008 Surfers Path Magazine of Dan Malloy riding a Bonzer, since reading that article I want to try one of those gizmo’s… a more efficient thruster!!  Dating back to the days before the thruster!!

I’n this design I’ve tried to capture the motion of the surfer showing the carved wave and spray fan almost as a vector field.  I’ve aimed for lots of motion and energy in the picture, throwing paint at the canvas and where possible using fast directional strokes of the pen and brush.

The colours I’ve chosen are hot and cold, high contrast and of a limited pallet.  I was aiming for a simple colour scheme to create a bold high impact image.  I wanted to create a design that was a perfect accent colour for a room, and a strong statement of speed and power.

The execution of the image is leaning towards a street art feel, blocks of colour, graf style curves, stencil work, tagging.

The Celtic work is freehand over a concept sketch framework.  It forms a single line and depicts a single human Zoomorphic surfer.  The following you tube is a rough cut of a time-lapse film I made of the final stages of the painting.  Other bits of the film (and eventually a edited and set to music version can be found on my videos page)

When I first launched my site someone asked me “what’s Algorithmic Art?  I’d like to click on that and hyperlink to a glossary”… well I don’t want to chuck someone out of my site and straight onto a wiki and a glossary is a bit dry to write… hence a blog!

OK, I’m going to talk briefly about maths, 1 paragraph, promise

An algorithm usually a mathematical expression referring to a sequence of steps to figure something out eg. working out the average (mean) of something…

1. add up all the data
2. divide by the number of data elements…

Now before I induce a coma, end of overly simple maths!

So it follows that algorithmic art is a sequence of steps to produce a piece of art.  Here’s a fundamental algorithm for drawing a Celtic tangle.

1. Create a grid
2. Join the dots on the grid to form a network
3. Check that no more than 2 line cross at any point
4. (optionally) check the knot is good, ie forms 1 line or has a long path with ‘no rings’ or short loops
5. Draw lines in parallel with the network lines (leaving gaps near the intersections)
6. Remove the network lines
7. Interlace the knot lines

Simple.  As each step is completed in turn the picture is revealed to the artist as much as the artist is creating it.

There are additional steps that can be applied to this process to create different designs… in time I’ll blog on these I’m sure!!

In the art world an Algorithmist (or algorithmic artist) is someone who creates art from a computer process often involving pseudo random variables (numbers generated by the computer which are very nearly random).  I would argue actually Algorithms are prevalent in art (and many human activities) … maybe it’s fair to say some other examples of Algorithms in art are:

• Photo stencilling: Take photo, cut stencils, choose colours, paint
• Wood carving: 2D design, mark outer edges of wood, cut in (along grain?), fine carving, sanding, varnish
• Impressionist painting: all strokes small and in same direction?
• Young British Artists:  think of outrageous idea, produce art, get response, if outrageous enough continue at step 2, else go-to step 1  (If Data off star trek was a Young British Artist ;-))

Perhaps these are techniques rather than algorithms???  To me an algorithm is a way of describing a mathematical technique to manipulate the world around us.  So why not describe art methods as Algorithms?