blog.NewTangled.com

I’ve been re-visiting some older designs, some of the very first knots that I created that took on the shapes of waves. I’m trying to use the computer to create attractive designs from these very simple sketches. Along the way, so far, these are what I’ve created.

The horizontal design makes me think of graphics from neo-psychedelic posters for raves in the 90s. Helterskelter, Flashback and Atomic Jam…. if you look closely it’s surprising how close this Kaleidoscope transformation has created a good knot from the original.

The vertical design makes me think of native american cherokee style feathered motifs, like some kind of space age red-indian artifact from an imagined civilization! But then I’ve been told before I have an over-active imagination!!

The Kalidoscope inspiration partly came from seeing pictures by North Devon artist Connor Wilson. His work can be seen in the Blue Groove Cafe in Croyde, which hosts an amazing giant mural depicting a perfect summers A-frame peak as spied through a break in a lush canopy. A surreal moon transformation floats in front of this scene… it has to be seen to be believed! The cafe also has many of his framed works including surreal style, automatic sketches and Mandalas (see resource here).

These Mandalas, or circle rotations, almost form celtic knot patterns (though close inspection shows the rules of interlacing, continuation etc are not followed). So roatating my simple designs produces these Celtic like patterns… which in themselfs I find inspiring. I want to take these computer generated patterns and come full circle to work over them by hand.

References:
http://conorwilson.co.uk/
www.mandalaproject.org
Blue Groove Cafe

Cheers!

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.