Spitsticker!

A few months ago I picked up a request to colourise some engravings.  They were all by a French artist of the mid 19th century called Gustav Dore.  Dore was a prolific artist and created a vast number of engravings to illustrate a number of books. The book in question here was a History of the Crusades by Michaud.

 

This method of illustration was overtaken by other printing techniques but there are still practitioners.  The spitsticker of the title is one of the principle engraving tools used in the construction of these images.

Andy English gives a good overview of the means by which the engravings are made.   On his site he also has a number of prints of  images which he created.  The beasts and garden ones are definitely worth a look. 

Tis the Season

 Had a little time this afternoon to do some Christmas shopping.  I confess I don't do the tasteful colour coordinated designer Christmas. I instead revel in the bright colourful stuff and have accumulated a motley set of decorations which carry memories of past Christmases from distant places.  Its dark and cold outside and I need to balance that out.  So today I added to my collection some LED lights (energy kind) and a small angel.  Tomorrow they will be artfully arranged on my tree.

The Guardian (UK newspaper) has gathered a collection of photographs of Christmas Trees (or not) that have graced the Tate Britain.  What you see is a battleground for statements ranging from the obscure - this years by Giorgio Sadotti's to the literal message left by Tracey Emin.  Check it out.   

Five a Day

Well I got busy putting together a showcase of some of my fruit a veg images.  It was heavy on the bananas and apples as thats what I tend to bring to work for lunch.  I have to take an hour lunch so I can spend 30 - 40 minutes drawing.  A lot of  it tends to be digital but I do break out the pencils as well.  I really like the watercolour pencils for this kind of ad hoc effort.  Sometimes it feel repetitive to work on the same subjects but looking at this collection  should keep working on them.  They were created in the last 2 years.

So the Dot character was made using 3D printing.  That is achieved by taking model information stored in a 3D modeling program and turning into a real 3D model that can be held and used.  The principle application of this kind of kit lies in the design and engineering worlds where there is a  requirement for prototypes.  With the increasing accessibility of 3D modeling programs such as Maya, Mudbox and the opensource Blender the uses and applications are likely to increase.  

The variety of uses of to which the 3D printing know how can be seen at the Shapeways website.   They can take your design and print it for you at a quite reasonable price. Alternatively you can choose from a range of other designers work.
Below is their 'how its done video'. 



Products available their include Lightpoem for LED candle,  Message Cuff Medium

or this cute fellow  Hoodie 5cm

If you look at these items you can see they are actually printed with a couple of different materials.

Join The Dots

Found the video below produced by Aardman. 


Along with this great clip which is a short 'making of the movie'.




They have already won the award Best Animation at this year’s British Television Advertising Craft Awards and epic awards with this movie.  

Most interesting is that they drew inspiration from the application of the cell phone cameras use in the remote diagnosis of disease in third world countries.



Another cool technology is what was used to create dot.  I will look at that next time. 
 

The Start

This is my first post on my first blog. I had a few false starts before this but I have a feeling this will a serious effort- until tomorrow.
I suppose I should set some agenda as to what will be the scope and content of this page. for the most part I am going to use this space to track my artistic efforts. I work full time and in the 'present economic climate' I should be glad of that but in the past 2 years I have put a bit of effort into developing my skills mostly in photoshop and oils and I want to push this further. I hope to use this space to document that effort and maybe some other folks will join in?