And Now for Something Completely Different

All through my life, I have made drawings. It is the first expression of art for most people. I was lucky enough to have access to miles of big paper due to the fact that my familiy's owning a dry good store and wrapped most things in lovely tan paper reeled off of a big roll stowed under the sales counter.

Never the less, I must admit am AM a paper hoarder. I admit it. And I like nothing better than to use colored pencils or watercolor with a lovely piece of tinted or heavy hunk of paper.

Here's some of my work:

Rhodies
Colored pencil on tan paper

Guam Palm

Watercolor 

Breadfruit

Colored Pencil

Playing Around with Design

Even though I don't have a studio right now, I never stop thinking and studying ceramics.

Some time ago, I made small templates of basic forms: Round and square plates. The forms are small enough to dash off a sketch or toy around with a design and variation. I can run off a copy on my printer and expand the idea or upload it into my computer.  

Here's an example:

The first one is a bit busy on the right side. And I would remove the small connecting lines at the bottom of the branch like figures.  

All in all, I think this would make a good wax resist platter. It would be interesting to try this in scraffito too.

 

   Here's a positive and negative of the same drawing.  (The darker snake is the original drawing.)  Although the snake image is about the same, the second image seems more of a 'fat snake'.

The third variation seems more dynamic just by adding another outline.

A lot of people do not like snakes. I'm not crazy about them, but I find their image fascinating. 

Maybe no one would want to eat an hors d'oeurvres off a plate like this.

Monoprints

Have you ever made a monoprint? They are easy to do and an interesting exercise in drawing.

What you need is an absorbent paper, a pencil, ink and a glass surface.

Brayer out the ink on the glass to a consistent coating. Slightly dampen the paper and lay it over the ink surface making sure there aren't any air bubbles, but do not rub the paper. Tricky, but easy to get the hang thereof.

For these drawings, I used some printing ink from the tail-end of a tube that was going to be thrown out after an art class.  (We will discuss art hoarding at another time. )

After you get the ink-glass-paper setup, begin drawing free hand to the paper surface. Press firmly to make sure the pencil strokes will transfer to the underside of the paper. Light rubbing is now permitted if you think it will add anything to the picture. You will know how this will work after you've done a few drawings.

When you are finished, carefully peel the paper off the ink ground.

Here's two drawings I made from some left-over newsprint, left-over ink and a piece of picture frame glass. (Now I wish I had used better paper, but there it is.)

This drawing shows some light rubbing.

The resultant art work has a very distinctive look and will come out reversed-image. Which may be a surprise to you and may make you correct some drawing idiosyncrasies you may have and didn't know about until then.













This drawing was done years before I lived in Bahrain and actually saw scenes like this. Sights like this was very common and would not depict people who were destitute or empoverished. It could very well be village women in town with items to sell.

Graphics Design - Logos

Well, I've been rather busy. 

We are in our winter location and I've been working on designing the new logo for a Wiki page for CLAYART.   

CLAYART is a worldwide clay artist's and a clay associated discussion email group that has been active for over 15 years. It began as an idea during a yearly National Conference for Education in the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) convention. I will explain NCECA and CLAYART further in future posts. But sufice it to say the internet email part of CLAYART is undergoing big changes at the moment. 

One of the new changes was the creation of a wiki page. My part was to design a tiny, easily-recognizable logo to mark the upper left-hand corner of the site. 

Being completely new to the designing of tiny wikis, I have been on an intense learning curve. 

I don't have sophisticated computer design software, but I have had an undergraduate series of courses in computer design which I took just because they were available to me. And I discovered that through Apple Pages, I can do a limited amount of black and white work. 

Warning:  Some Graphics Geekdom follows--

The catenary arch design was made by stretching a black circle into an oval, then overlaying it with a white oval, adding a thick horizontal line to connect the bottom of the arch and suggest the floor of a kiln. 

I blocked the bottom of the ovals with a lineless rectangle placed below the "bottom of the kiln" line and layered over the top (brought forward) of the oval shapes. That blocked the bottom sections of the ovals from view which is equal to erasing them. 

The teapot was made by manipulating black and white ovals. And the handle to the pot is made the same way by layering a white oval over a black one. 

The body of the pot is another black oval, with another white one imposed to suggest a lid. The lid knob is a standard shape available from the menu and layered over the black and white ovals (brought forward).

The whole design is on top of a black rectangle, which was sent to the back. This creates the top 3 borders of the logo.

The lettering at the bottom was lifted from a tiny graphic I had squirreled away and used on this blog some years ago. 

This is fine for a tiny wiki, but when I wanted to enlarge it to a huge file for use in other ways, that's where the trouble began. All the enlargements resulted in shaggy, pixelated lettering. 

I finally ran the whole thing out of my printer at page-size and, using a fine marking pen, smoothed up the letters one by one. Like, taking-off-your-glasses, sticking-you-nose-to-the-page making-pixels-go-from-squares-to-smooth-edges smoothing. 

More later---

Written later than the above versions.  Sorry for all the changes after the initial posting. On re-reading the first ones, I realized I could write a clearer description of the geek graphics.

A Two Dimensional Interlude

Found while sorting visual reference files......

Drawn for the amusement of my children when they were in grade school.....
            Quote by V. Lindsay

Funny, the things you keep.



By the way,

    In real life,
         
          I hate grasshoppers.

Doodle to Design

All my school notebooks had doodles down the margins.

It wasn't that I was not paying attention; actually, I could remember what was being said by looking at the doodles.

I took notes too. I don't mean to say the doodles were the ONLY thing I did while in class.

Some doodles grew into pictures or expanded into design.

This little doodle is about 3 times larger than the original. I liked it so much I cut it out and glued it on a larger piece of paper so that I wouldn't loose it.

The first time I used this design was on a large slab of clay rolled out with the intention of cutting it up. But when I looked at the shape, I liked it so much I coaxed it into a large platter, smoothed the edges and fired it. The "Angry Cat" was done over the iron glaze with thinned oxide.

Every time I've used this design, I've sold the piece.

Drawing Overlapping Fronds

I love playing with layers of pattern and variation. Here's one exercise that's fun and gives you head a bit of creative twist:

First, draw one half of the outline of a frond.

Add the adjacent set of leaves.

Turn the paper over and draw a second frond on the reverse.

Then add a medium filler either lightly in pen or pencil so the second leaf will show through on the paper when it is turned over again to the right side.

Begin to darken the first set of leaves.

The reverse frond will 'read' through after the first leaves are darkened.

Add the reverse leaves in a lighter value and darken the top fronds for contrast.

Now if I could only figure out how to do this with glaze......Using a grid guide might work, just as in enlarging a drawing. Would probably have to do this in underglaze for it to work with crisp lines.

Here's how the back winds up after the drawing is finished.

This idea would work with just about any complicated pattern you want to overlap.

I suppose you could do the same idea without flipping the page from front to back by drawing the frond outlines very lightly using two contrasting colored pencils.

Drawings--rough drafts

I've been doing a fair amount of rifleing through some old work at an attempt (Notice I said 'Attempt') to better organize my environment and I ran across a couple of things I did for projects.

This is the plan for a wax of "Tracking the Thunderbird", a project that was a collaboration between the local water board, the library and the schools in order to bring awareness to the various sources of water in our area. And believe me, in the Pacific Northwest water is everywhere. It was brilliant.

The idea was to set up teams of three people: An illustrator, a story-teller and an artist to design a large bronze plaque. The plaques would all have the same basic motif--the stylized head of a thunderbird.

As each story was developed, the artist would modify the design of the thunderbird head to fit the different chapters of the study book. We met as teams and brainstormed ideas for each of the chapters. My group was Estuary. The writer wrote a story which the illustrator worked into the book drawings and I carved the wax blank for the plaque design.

Thunderbird bronzes which were cast using a sand mold process, were mounted on concrete bases and then placed or hidden in various areas that illustrated each of the locations and sources of water. The task for the children was to find the bronzes using clues in the book--a kind of science scavenger hunt.

It was a rather nervous project for me because I got one and only one wax blank. No re-dos allowed. I drew and drew, tweaked and tweaked the design. The main story idea was a giant snake controlled an estuary of the fresh, brackish and salt water and all the creatures that lived there and depended on it. He held them in the coils of his body and lay with his tail in the fresh water; his head in the salt water. (The Estuary I was illustrating was a very twisty-winding creek.) The upshot of the tale was that a brave sea gull marshalled a band of sea gulls to drove the snake from the estuary so all the creatures could live and thrive. Hey, I didn't write it, okay?

Does the snake look a little familiar?

One of the tricks is that there are 12 birds hidden within the design.
Can you find them? Hint: Think positive and negative images. And don't forget the Thunderbird.

Playing with Design

I'm fascinated with pattern. The other day, I saw a program about the Aborigines in Western Australia showing some of their work being exhibited in an arts festival. It was very distinctive with more line and pattern than drawings and paintings I had seen before. I found them to be quite beautiful. It was the inspiration for this series of drawings:

Preliminary idea sketches--very quick and spontaneous. Just enough to get an idea down.


Further expansion of the first ideas with more developed thoughts with the inclusion of points in space; exploring the impact of just one more line element. (I really like the top one.)






Almost going over the edge.













Seeing how the design expands and changes with color.












Another variation: Working vertically and expanding an earlier design with limited color, changing the appearance with a deeper color change.And the dimension of the element of points




































And a bit more tightly worked horizontal design with the tiles and first lines placed, then a double line and the added element of multi-colored areas. Note that the tiles have now been taken to areas of color of space with the removal of the bottom and top borders of the white line areas.








These ideas could work as well in a large wall painting or in clay. Any one of the individual tiles in any of the drawings could be taken out of the arrangement and used as a great tile design. Or, used together would be wonderful on a large tray or wallpiece.


Sidenote: After I worked on these drawings, I went out onto the patio to read. I looked up from my book and saw this: Who says our environment doesn't have an impact on us?