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After what seems like too long since I’ve had the opportunity to work on one of my own projects (client work and other fun explorations have been keeping me ‘otherwise engaged’) I’ve recently started working on a new series of creature drawings (I use the term ‘series’ loosely… more a way of grouping things in my own mind than anything else).
reptiles rock!
A couple of weeks ago I received a beautiful little notebook, with a very apt cover, as a gift from a friend (thanks Miek!). This book proved the perfect vehicle for a bunch of quick, freehand drawings – made in a bid to loosen-up-the-old-drawing-hand before starting on the larger scale, final drawings. The silky smooth paper took the ink beautifully (no bleed!) and produced a very satisfying skritch skritch sound as the nib moved across its surface. I also love the crinkly, tactile quality of the pages that have buckled where I was a bit heavy-handed with the ink application.
a glossy starling, and some experimental textures and patterns
As the drawings were made directly in Indian ink with a dip pen, and thus no preliminary pencil drawing, some of these critters are a tad wonky! But I like their spontaneity (something I hope to maintain an element of in the final drawings) and, restricted to black ink only (my final drawings will be in black & white, perhaps later translated into colour screenprints), I had a lot of fun experimenting with various ways to create feathery/furry/scaly/spiky/etc patterns and textures.
a puffer fish, and some more experimental textures and patterns
And finally, here’s an animated GIF of the filled notebook (it’s a 20 frame GIF so it may take a few moments to download properly!)…
tweet! tweet!
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Soon after I had started work on the drawings for my ‘amateur naturalist’s specimen collection’ print series I was approached by Chômu Press about creating a book cover illustration for one of their new releases (Nick Jackson’s ‘The Secret Life of the Panda’). The brief I received from Chômu contained phrases like “There’s a scholar studying tiny creatures under a microscope in sixteenth century Holland” and “There are repeated animal references… (birds of various kinds, an ermine, a cockroach, a water flea, vipers, rabbits, fish, river dolphins and so on). Often these have a scientific quality – like the study of biology and anatomy, or the collecting of specimens” – Um… yes please! I’d like to work on that!
concept sketch & drawings for the book cover illustration
I presented several different concept sketches to Chômu, but it was the rough sketch of a collection of specimens laid out in a grid (intended to simply represent a specimen display cabinet as though viewed from above) that they wished to pursue… and so the early work I had done on my ‘specimen collection’ project inspired and informed the creation of the book cover illustration, and work on the book cover illustration fed back into my growing series of specimens. A very happy bit of synchronicity!
some of the drawings made for ‘The Secret Life of the Panda’ book cover
The author and the publisher made the bold (and exciting!) decision to leave the cover entirely, mysteriously free of text (apart from the ISBN on the back and the Chômu Press logo on the spine).
‘The Secret Life of the Panda’ book cover
I had the opportunity to read the book in its entirety earlier this year… it’s a hauntingly memorable “fusion of realism and dream-like fantasy”, an always intriguing, at times disturbing, collection of finely-crafted stories. But I am no skilled literary reviewer – you can read reviews and find out more about ‘The Secret Life of the Panda’ on the Chomu Press website >
* apparently not a valid Scrabble word… but I like it!
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I have at last completed the new series of little screenprints (the largest is ±9x9cm) I’ve been working on, loosely entitled ‘An amateur naturalist’s specimen collection’ (the larva of which you may have already met here). I have been patiently waiting for some bright, natural light (not a common phenomenon in the depths of a Northern winter) in order to photograph them and make them available in my shop. The beautiful, crisp, bright days came earlier this week (along with some bone-chilling sub-zero temperatures!), the photos have been taken and, after a bit of tweaking (bright winter light is still winter light), they’ll be ready to go. In the meantime, as I love to see pictures of other peoples’ studios, projects or processes, I thought I would upload some process pics* of my own over the next couple of days (and buy myself some time to get the prints listed in the shop!).
I was inspired to make the series by all the small, wonderful remnants of nature I’ve found on long beach walks, mountain hikes and woodland wanderings (or, in the case of the iridescent blue-green beetle encased for all eternity in perspex and pictured below, at the curious natural history treasure-trove ‘Evolution‘ in New York City). I wanted to make a series of vividly coloured, graphic and emblematic images in homage to these beautiful, precious things that always seem to fit perfectly into the palm of a hand, or reassuringly into a pocket.
The first step, of course, was to raid my ‘specimen’ collection for inspiration…
… and make some choices about the things I wanted to draw (there were also some critters/specimens I really wanted to draw but don’t have in my collection – e.g. a chameleon skull, a sand dollar skeleton, a larva! – so these required a bit of book and/or internet research).
Research done, I started on the ink drawings…
always happy when the early morning light hits my desk and studio walls just so (and it appears that my ammonite drawing was unconsciously informed by two stripey studio-mates!)
the initial brush and ink drawings were made at 2x the intended final print size
Once completed the drawings were scanned, tweaked & resized and digitally manipulated to create the ‘colour separations’ necessary for the screenprinting phase (a separate ‘image’ is required for each layer/colour to be printed, as can be seen in the photo below of some of the colour separation transparencies I made. These are used to transfer the images onto the screen before printing, by coating the screen in a light sensitive photo-emulsion and, when the emulsion is dry & with the transparencies positioned on the screen, exposing it to UV light).
As I don’t have the facilities to screenprint at my home studio (I work at the wonderful Amsterdams Grafisch Atelier when I want to screenprint) it’s important that I ‘front-load’ a project as much as I can to ensure that when I do arrive at the Atelier I can work as efficiently as possible.
Next post… let the printing begin!
* This is not intended as a step-by-step guide to screenprinting or a tutorial of any kind – it is merely a collection of roughly chronological process pics… for anyone who might be interested in the general anatomy of a screenprinting project (from
this person’s perspective ;)
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Although I wasn’t consciously aware of this at the time of drawing it would appear that the transparencies I recently prepared for an experimental screenprinting project I’ve been working on this week were inspired by…
doing the washing-up
and a morning shower
I guess that’s testament to the fact that inspiration can be found just about anywhere :)
A week or so ago I spent a few days in the printmaking studio working on a new set of small, individual ‘Curiosity Cabinet’ prints. There were very few people at work in the studio on the days I was there but there was still a very palpable buzz of antecedent creativity… in the multicoloured ink spots on the door handles and around the ink-mixing area (vibrant remnants of a million past projects)…
in the pleasingly structural patterns created by the drying racks and stacked screens…
and in the other-worldly, sulphuric glow cast by the daylight block-out windows in the coating and clean-up room…
I love to see the crisp, completed prints stack up…
but I’m also equally enamoured with the ‘distressed’ quality of the image negatives on the screen when the printing stage is completed and it’s time to strip the exposed emulsion and reclaim the screen…
and especially as they dissolve back into ghostly nothingness…
During this session I printed six individual creatures in a limited edition of 30 prints each. These wriggly, squiggly, spiny, slippery fellows make up ‘Series 1′ in my ongoing series (I just cannot stop drawing them!) of ‘Wonders from a Cabinet of Curiosities’, and they can now all be found in my etsy shop if you’d like to start your own curiosity cabinet collection. They can be acquired individually or as a complete set of six.
I’ve already finished drawing the ‘Series 2′ creatures… and I can’t wait to get back into the studio to print them!
Inky fingers are indeed happy fingers :)
