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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.

 

Negative sketch of Teahupoo barrel view celtic knotwork

Here’s a sketch I’ve been working on over the last week or so, it’s inspired by a photo by Jon Frank of the monster wave at Teahupoo.  It’s taken from inside the giant tube Mick Fanning is racing away from.  It’s a pretty awesome shot, I love the way the wave is curling over and completely joins up with the spray from Fanning board.  I think the shot was taken up by Rip Curl or Billabong for an advert.

The knot in this sketch wasn’t really finalised, I didn’t resolve it to be continuouse or a single line, I really just wanted to try out a few different ideas the photo gave me. 

I’ve played with scale on the lines to give perspective and depth.  The sea heading off to the horizon I was playing with an arbitrary pattern when I made the network for the knot and then chose a rule for the crossing over points (which way the knot continued to lead or break).  The result looks quite computer generated, a bit like game graphics from the 80’s I think.  

I played about with the shot in paint shop pro adjusting the hue and saturation, lightness, contrast and then making the image negative.  The sketch original was done in coloured fine-liners.  You can see the steps I took in the sketch:

• Concept sketch
• Grid
• Network
• Line Fattening

Mick Fanning, Teahupoo, by Jon Frank

 I came across this photo in the Surfers Path Magazine, you can see more Jon Frank images here:

http://surferspath.com/photographer-folios/image_full/253/

Favorite quote from the artical:

“Most opportunities slip quickly away, but occasionally I will trap one in my little black box to keep.”

Best shot in the Folio is (in my humble opinion):

Silver Linings, Tahiti, by Jon Frank

It looks wild and stormy, I get the feeling the surfers alone in the elements.  It looks like a huge arena to be lost in!  Hmmm how much is a flight to Tahiti??  Still, I think this appeals because it invokes a feeling of what it’s like to be alone in a big stormy surf area, like a less than perfect but big ish day a Saunton, when there’s not many people out and you find yourself all alone. 

Like Tahiti, but cold, without the power and mushy.  Ok so not that much like Tahiti.

Two things at the moment:

1. My face is puffed up like Marlon Brando. I had a wisdom tooth removed.  I have some time off work!
2. I’m scouring the web for links to my blog and to socialise.  This is a source of inspiration.

I came across a blog by Droog79 (reference below), it inspired me create a piece of Japanese Surf Art in the unplanned street style:

Three Zoomorphic Curls Sketch 1. 

I used Pro markers and aimed for bold lines, high contrast and lots of detail.  The surfers are like Jelly Babies, like a pop cult reference.  The soap suds are a reference to Graffiti writing.

What prompted me to create this…

Droogs art: awesome! For the UK it reminded me of

• ‘Supermundane’ an artist/illustrator I’d seen under that name (anything but run-of-the-mill)
• as well as album art of Mr Scruff.
• Generally it reminded me of unplanned drawings of the Japanese Street Style:  A great example of being Nobumasa Takahashi:

Check this out, an entire wall painted by Takahashi San from ideas given to him as he worked (spot the surfer heading towards the mouth of a giant head)

http://www.pingmag.jp/images/title/nobumasa_drawing.jpg”>

Source: Nobumasa Takahashi pingmag.jp
http://pingmag.jp/2006/02/08/nobumasa-takahashi-draws/

There’s some great art out there, surfing the web is a great way to find grassroots artists and big names which can open up new ideas to you.  Cheers for the blog Droog79 (check it out at http://www.droog79.blogspot.com/)

Also see:

• Supermundane: http://www.supermundane.com/
• Mr Scruff: http://www.mrscruff.com/
• Florence Manlik:  http://manlik.blogspot.com/
• Akira Yamaguchi: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/print/features/arts2005/fa20050105a1.htm (if anyone knows an official website please let me know!!)

You can also see a timelapse movie of my sketch:

Now I’m off to eat some more chicken soup :-/

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)