blog.NewTangled.com

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!!