Print, Prints and Printed- A Gallery of My Riso, Relief and Screen Prints

| Rolo

This week has been a fun one, we’ve done so much printmaking, including printing an unexpected one-page zine on Monday. I kept with my Lovecraftian theme and created a bestiary of his monsters, I was really happy with the designs I drew, but the finished zine did not go to plan at all. I think I rushed the background a bit and I hadn’t done risograph printing before, so despite having researched the process, I wasn’t entirely sure how it would work in practice. I drew my monster sketches in pencil and scribbled the background in pen, which in hindsight wasn’t the best idea because when it came to printing the zine, the background overpowered my illustrations and the risograph printed wasn’t able to pick up much of the detail of my pencil sketches so the final zine looks like a bit of a mess. It was a good learning exercise though, at least I know that next time I riso print, I need to make my line work bolder and the background needs to be done in a lighter tone to the foreground.

The zines were only the first part of printing we did on Monday, in the afternoon we went to the print workshop to make our screens for screen printing the 2nd of our designs. It cost £14 for the screens which is a bit on the high side for me because I’m having some money issues in the run up to Christmas, but after actually using the screen, I know it was a worthwhile investment because I can print that design as much as I want now and also change the screen and use the same frame for any other designs I make in the future. I managed to do a design that I am really happy with, it depicted one of Lovecraft’s monsters, a Mi-Go, perched over a power-plant and feeding off of its fumes. I chose to depict this because in Lovecraft lore, the Mi-Go awakens from its slumber when it gets warm and power plants heavily contribute to global warming. I wanted to show how horrible and horrific the world could be if it keeps heating up at the rate it is, using the Mi-go to depict the horrors of what life would be like in a scorching, desolate Earth. I’m once again not 100% certain if my illustration conveys the message that I want it to though, I know what it means, but I’m not convinced that other people will, they’d probably just a cool giant bug creature so when I do more designs this project I need to make the climate change and global warming message clearer, while still using Lovecraftian creatures so that I stick to the theme that I’ve chosen for this project.

  • Sketched in pencil, refined in Illustrator and finished in Photoshop.
  • I screen-printed this design on to 200gsm paper.
Relief printed with an acrylic block and ink and put through a roller press.

I had to send my first design back off to the wood workshop place to be re- laser cut because I made a mistake with the formatting when I send it off the first time (no surprises there) so some of my design was missing from the acrylic plate, this all got sorted by Thursday though so I managed to create a lot of prints of both of the designs. I’ll post photos of the prints next week once the ink has all dried. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed printing so far, I’m just not sure about risograph printing yet, probably because it is the one that went the worst for me. I totally get the appeal of risograph printing, it’s so easy to create a huge run of prints, I just haven’t quite figured out how to make the process work for me yet, hopefully over the weekend I’ll be able to create a design that works because we are creating an A3 riso-print on Monday. It’d be great if I had another design to add to my permanent print collection. I already have some ideas of what I’m going to depict, I plan on showing a modern polluted and poisoned world with buildings that everyone should be able to recognise, inspired by Lovecraft’s short story ‘The Colour Out of Space’, I’ll leave a link to the story on this post. I’m hoping that I can make my message clear this time, hopefully 3rd time’s the charm.

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cs.aspx

Achievement unlocked!

| Rolo
Mural painted by Iga Pencak for L&S Gifts in Wallsend.

I’m so happy with myself right now, I got a high merit (or a 2:1) on my first university project in almost a year!! I was so worried that I’d only get a pass, but all of the work I put into the Character Design project finally paid off. The mural that my girlfriend was commissioned to do got finished on time too and the woman commissioned her loved it, I was so happy that it worked out and the mural is now displayed in Wallsend, hopefully forever. I did struggle to get all of the research done on time and to be honest, I still have one form of printing to research so I am a little bit behind right now. I’ll catch up though, now that the mural is out of the way. I would love to get a distinction at the end of the course, the only reason I didn’t get one this time is because I had an idea of what Skaadi would look like from the start and I stuck with that design throughout the entire project. In the future I need to explore different designs and develop my characters and ideas more. I do struggle with this to be honest; I think too much about what I want to achieve and once I have a solid idea, I just stick to it. I really should sketch out multiple designs first and be a bit more adventurous with my development instead of just keeping my ideas exactly the same from start to finish.

First print design , 2b pencil on paper.

Since last week I’ve managed to finish researching all of the artists that were set to us by the tutors, including Hokusai, Liv Rainey-Smith and Jack Davis, and I’ve researched relief printing and risograph printing, all that’s left to do as far as the research goes is screen-print research, technically we we’re supposed to have finished this by now so I have made things a bit harder for myself but I’m not too worried; I like the writing and research side of things so it shouldn’t take me too long. As well as the research I’ve also completed my first design for printing, I opted to draw Cthulhu riding a plastic polluted Hokusai inspired wave, with a trident piercing a skull and water bottle at the moment the wave crashes over Big Ben. It sounds like a lot I know but I don’t know how else to put it, I chose to do this design because alike the Skaadi project where I made my design depict the Amazon Rainforest crisis, I wanted to make my designs this project convey some of the horrific issues that are facing our world today. I chose to depict the ongoing plastic pollution problem that is threatening our oceans because it is something that could and probably will wipe out much of our known world if we don’t do something about it. My design serves as a warning, with Cthulhu symbolising the horrors of pollution and the great wave that could flood the world if the ice caps continue to melt and the sea levels rise.

Initial print design idea. 2b pencil on paper. Inspired by Hokusai.

I struggled with designing this because I knew what I wanted to convey, I just didn’t know how, I’m not even sure if my final design is effective at getting the message across, my original sketch was far too derivative of Hokusai, it took me a couple of attempts to get something that I was happy with. Time was against me though and I had to settle with what I had, it’s not that I don’t like the design, it’s just missing something where the white space is. I guess can always paint over the design once it’s been printed or redo it in my own time, but the main thing is that the design has been sent off to the right place for it to be laser cut onto acrylic ready for printing. Speaking about sending the file off, I once again struggled with formatting my design correctly to be laser cut, my tutor told us how to do it but a lot of the information got lost to me in my head, I don’t know if it’s because he was throwing a lot of information at the class really fast, or because I wasn’t paying attention enough due to the fact I get anxious in clss. Either way, I need to work on my ability to format things, I keep meaning to take a notebook to class with me so that I can take notes on how to do these things, but ironically, I keep forgetting to do so. I will try to take a notebook next time because I am sick of feeling kind of stupid when I have to keep asking the tutors to help me send files to certain places to be marked or printed. I don’t see many other people needing help with this and to be perfectly honest, I don’t want to have to either. I think we are printing the design on Monday which I am looking forward to, it’d be good to finally have a design that I can print over and over again, it could be something that I end up selling on Etsy which would be nice. We’ve already been asked to create another design for a different form of printmaking that we’ll be doing soon, which is great because I’ll have a lot of reproduceable designs in the near future. I’m probably going to stick with the Lovecraftian take on modern day issues theme that I’ve started with the Cthulhu design, so I guess I’m going to need to look for a more obscure one of his creatures, I don’t want to only use Cthulhu in my designs. I love H.P. Lovecraft though, so the next weekend is going to be quite fun.

Warning- Cute Dog Painting Inside

| Rolo
Rainey-Smith, L. (2019). Gallery | The Art of Liv Rainey-Smith. [online] Xylographilia.com. Available at: https://xylographilia.com/gallery/#jp-carousel-3538 [Accessed 14 Nov. 2019].

Well, this has a been a pretty productive week so far, I’ve done over half of the research and figured out which of my own artists I am going to choose to research once I’ve finished the ones set by my tutors. I found a really cool woodcut printmaker called Liv Rainey-Smith who does some seriously gothic, Lovecraftian designs; her work is right up my alley and is definitely going to tie into my more macabre theme that I plan on running with this project, with H.P. Lovecraft being one of the godfathers of horror, he even has a branch of horror named after him! The level of detail Rainey-Smith achieves with woodcut is mind-blowing too, it’s almost hard to believe that she’s using woodcut to create her designs. I’m getting so excited about this project now; I think I’m going to hone the spirit of Lovecraft with my designs this time too. The only thing I’m worried about is whether or not I am going to have time to finish the research because my girlfriend is working on a large mural commission  that is going up in Wallsend and it’s looking like she is going to need help finishing it before the deadline on Saturday. I may have to put my research project on hold for a couple of days to make sure that the mural gets finished on time and do my best to catch up on the research afterwards. I just can’t let her struggle like this, we’ve collaborated on murals before, we painted a caravan together and work well together so I’m confident that if I help her then it’ll get done on time and then I can wholly focus on the research afterwards, even if it means staying up most of the night on Sunday, it’s not like I have a project hand in on Monday, her deadline is more important right now.

Photos from the caravan me and @babajagaart panted a while back.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa- Hokusai

All of this said, I am still going to do bits of research in between painting the mural, like when the paint is drying etc, so hopefully I won’t have a horrific amount to do on Sunday. As well as Liv Rainey-Smith, I plan on researching the legendary Hokusai, I mean how could I not research him for the purpose of a print project, he literally revolutionised relief printing and took it into a whole other realm. I’m not usually that interested in the historical artists, which I know is bad because we wouldn’t be where we are with art without them, however, there are a few historical artists that I’m really interested in and Hokusai is one of them. I don’t really know a lot about him as a person or artist, only what I’ve seen of his work like the great wave so it will be interesting to research him properly and find out how he achieved so much in his life, maybe I could learn something that I could apply to my own artistic practice.

The third and final artist that I’m going to research isn’t even a print maker at all, which I’m hoping won’t be a problem, I’m not sure if we’re only supposed to research artists that make prints. Anyway, I’m going to research Jack Davis, best known for his work on the Creepshow comics, I’ve chosen him as more of a style reference than anything else, he used to create highly bizarre and macabre characters that I think could inspire my own horror focused style during the print project. I’m really hoping that we get to create enough prints to take home and not just prints for the course during the project because I wouldn’t mind selling some on etsy or something, it’s not exactly making comics but I have thought about selling art prints and getting myself out there for a while, I’ve just never had the resources to do so and I’m hoping exploring all of the print facilities I’ll have access to on the upcoming project will change that. I’m happy that we are going to be doing different types of printing because I’ll be able to figure out which one works out best for me, who knows, it could even be the start of a print business venture for me.

Hokusai Research

| Rolo

*I have also included this research in my sketchbook as part of the same project.

Hokusai was a Japanese artist who is perhaps most well-known for his woodblock prints that depicted landscapes, such as the world renown print ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’. The type of printing that Hokusai mastered over the course of his life was called ukiyo-e, which translates to ‘pictures of the floating world’, they were Japanese paintings and prints that originally depicted landscapes of the city’s leisure districts during the Edo period. They were often idyllic and peaceful, which definitely translates through Hokusai’s paintings and prints which look rather serene and make me feel calm inside. 

There are a lot of things that I could write about the history of Hokusai, he lived a long and eventful life and created art under 30 different names throughout his career. For the sake of keeping this research to the point of illustration and printing alone though, I will try to keep the elements of his past and life as brief as possible, while still talking about his style and influences. At the start of his career, Hokusai originally created prints of Kabuki actors, which was common for ukiyo-e artists at the time, this changed when his wife died in 1793, Hokusai began to explore other art styles from outside of Japan, including European styles that he was exposed to through French and Dutch copper engravings that he managed to acquire throughout his life. This was just one of the first changes in his life that would spark the work of the Hokusai that we know today, he was expelled from one of the schools he attended, and he credited the embarrassment caused by this event as being motivation and inspiration for his art. He changed his focus from painting and printing actors and instead became focused on landscapes and imagery depicting the daily life of Japanese people from all manners of social classes. It was this change in subject that led him down the path of art that he is most well known for. 

Cain, A., 2016. 7 Things You Didn’T Know About Hokusai, Creator Of The Great Wave. [online] Artsy. Available at: <https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-7-things-hokusai-creator-great-wave/amp&gt;

As well as creating prints, Hokusai spent time producing many brush paintings, called surimono, there is a story that during a Tokyo festival in 1804, Hokusai created a portrait of the Buddhist priest Daruma which was said to be 600ft long using a broom and buckets of ink. Another story tells a tale that during a competition against more traditional artist, Hokusai created a painting by painting a blue curve on a piece of paper and chased a chicken with red paint on it’s feet across the painting, saying that it depicted the Tatsuta river with red maple leaves floating in it. Hokusai won the competition. While I may not be using such out there and amazing methods to create my art, I could definitely learn from Hokusai’s creativity and use it as inspiration to try new methods of art throughout the course of the upcoming project. Hokusai became increasingly famous throughout Japan due to his art and the fact that he was an extremely talented self-promoter, something that I really need to work on because I am painfully bad at promoting myself, probably due to a lack of confidence in my art, learning about how Hokusai promoted himself could definitely help me build the confidence to promote my own art. 

the Guardian. 2017. Hokusai: The Great Wave That Swept The World. [online] Available at: <https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/may/19/hokusai-japanese-artist-late-blossoming-great-wave-mount-fuji&gt;

At age 51 Hokusai entered the period of his life where he created Hokusai Manga and a number of art manuals, these manuals served as an easy way for him to make more money to fuel his life and career. The first book of Hokusai’s Manga was published in 1814 and it, as well as his sketches and caricatures heavily influenced the modern form of manga comics that many people around the world read today. Hokusai inspired generations and created a culture, a worldwide phenomenon. I should mention now that I have no intention to pursue manga as a source of inspiration this project, but I am definitely interested in how Hokusai started it. He published 12 volumes of his manga, along with another 3 that were published after his death, this collection contained thousands of drawings of animals, religious figures and everyday people in Japan. I really like the fact that Hokusai loved to draw animals, I do too, and I will use this as a source of inspiration for my design of a print this project, I am more than considering using imagery of animals in my design. In 1820 Hokusai secured fame as an artist across Japan and it was during this time period that he created his most famous works ’36 views of Mount Fuji’ which included the print that I am most inspired by called ‘The Great Wave off Kangawa’, it is the prints of waves that I love the most from Hokusai, they are so serene and the style is so clean and calming, I want to achieve a similar effect in some of the prints I create throughout the course of this project so I may use imagery of water or waves in my designs.

SMART- Character Design

| Rolo
  • Spend more time researching at the beginning of the project.
  • Try to be less reliant on computers for my final outcome, I need to find a balance between traditional and digital work.
  • Learn to adapt a bit more, stop being so stubborn about your ideas and let them grow and develop more naturally instead of forcing it.

Don’t Panic, It’s Only Hand-In Day

| Rolo
I need to take my own advice.

Well… Today was a bit of a mess, the good news is that I finally handed in the Character Design project, the bad news is it took me the entire day to get there. Today was an anxiety day and a bad one at that, I ran out of anxiety meds and barely slept last night trying to make sure everything was perfect and ready to hand in, which in hindsight wasn’t the best idea; no pills and no sleep makes me a stressed boy. All throughout the day I watched as people rushed to finish their project, spend a few minutes handing it in digitally and go home, whereas despite having my project done before going to uni, I was still the last person to go home because I just couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to format my artwork correctly to send off to the submissions dropbox, nor could I figure out how to print out my character boards and final illustration, despite having done this many times before. My brain just was clearly on vacation today. I guess it is over now and I can rest easy knowing that I have handed in the best I could do at the time. In the future, I am so going to have to manage my time more effectively and prepare for the fact that things are most likely going to go wrong on hand in day. I need to have everything sorted and ready to hand in a whole 24 hours before hand in day so that I don’t end up having to stay up until a ridiculous hour before going to uni. Hopefully this way I can be properly rested and in a better mental state to deal with anything that goes wrong on hand in day, because to be perfectly honest, the more things went wrong, the worse my mental state got, and I basically had a complete breakdown which could have been avoided.

As I expected, we’re off next week and have been given a research task for the upcoming project to be handed in by Monday. There are a lot of artists and companies to research on the list, more than we have been given before, which I’m pretty sure is due to the fact that not everyone on the course necessarily does a lot of research, something that has been mentioned in class previously. Hopefully this doesn’t apply to me because I spent a lot of time doing my research for the Skaadi project, nevertheless I will do my best to complete the whopping 11 people/companies to research that the tutors have given us plus another 3 of our choice in just over a week, it’s a good thing I enjoy writing!! The upcoming project looks like one I will really enjoy though, it seems to be a print based project and we’ll be doing risograph printing (something I’ve seen done but haven’t tried before) relief printing (I’ve done lino cut before with varying results) and screen printing which is the one I am looking forward to the most because during the final project on my level 3 course I did screen printing for the first time in my life and managed to get my first distinction ever, so I’ve got high hopes for it this time.

I’m going to spend the next week delving into the world of printing and research artists that I feel could influence my style this project, I’m thinking about going down a more macabre route this time, while still linking it to current world events. I enjoy making sci-fi/fantasy and horror tropes and gothic comment on the modern world. Besides, my main interests generally fall between sci-fi/ fantasy and horror, I did fantasy last time with Skaadi the demon elf, so now it’s time for something a bit on the dark side. I haven’t been doing a lot of my own art lately and I don’t think I’m going to have much time to in the foreseeable future with uni, so I guess I’m going to have my make my own artwork my university work.

SWOT- Character Design Brief

| Rolo

Strengths- I would say that my main strengths this project have been a willingness to adapt to digital processes, there was a time when I would never use computers in my art but I have realised how useful they can be in complimenting traditional media. I would also say my social and environmental awareness has been a strength this project, because I am passionate about helping to fight issues such as climate change and deforestation which has driven me to create the final outcome that I did.

Weaknesses- Bad time management has been a huge weakness of me this project, I didn’t plan for how difficult it would be to readjust to using computers in my art, or how long it would take me to develop my final outcome which led to a lot of stress trying to make sure I got everything done before the end of the project.

Opportunities- Pictoplasma competitions, Fat Lass Preserve Project, World Illustration Awards

Threats- My lack of time management often leads to a lot of stress for me which is a threat to myself and my processes. I need to work on creating coherent timetables for myself and stick to them to put less pressure on my mental health.

Skaadi Reborn

| Rolo

Well, I did it, I managed to redraw Skaadi’s legs and I can happily say that she looks like she belongs in the environment. It was not an easy task, at all. I asked my girlfriend to pose for me again so that I had some god first hand reference to draw from and even then I struggled; the position that the legs needed to be in meant that I had to use some foreshortening which is something I always try to avoid. I think it took me about 5 attempts to draw the legs in a way that they would make some sort of proportional sense, but it’s done now anyway and I guess it was a good learning exercise, I can’t avoid using foreshortening forever, especially since I hope to go into comic design someday. I think I need to practice doing foreshortening more, my attitude towards it isn’t the best and I managed to do it this time, so I should practice more so that I can get better and not struggle with it so much when I need to do it for a project again.

  • Stage 1 of Skaadi’s new legs.
  • Stage 2, the leg line work.
  • The colouring of the legs.
  • The finished product.

I’ve managed to finish my development board now too, I took what my tutor (Sarah) said to me in mind and decided to layout Skaadi’s character poses and weaponry in a straight line across the centre of the page, they look really uniform now and I’m quite pleased with it. My second board primarily has Skaadi’s expressions on it to show the different sides of her, from her brave elven side to her horrific demon persona. I wrote a few paragraphs explaining each part of Skaadi in detail so that the audience could really understand her and hopefully feel for her because she is in such an awful predicament.

  • Final Character Board 1
  • Final Character Board 2
Character Boards

I feel like I’ve come a long way as a person and illustrator since I was last on this course over a year ago, I’m more willing to adapt to using digital art methods and try new things, things that I was rather stubborn about not using in the past. I’m realising that I don’t always need to make things difficult for myself, and that I’m not as bad at art as I used to think. I still have a long way to come with my confidence but at least I feel like I’m getting somewhere. This project is coming to a close soon and I’m not so worried about getting everything done on time, my sketchbook is up to date, though it could look a lot neater and my work could be presented in a better way. I really need to work on my sketchbook presentation skills, I feel like a lot of the pages look grimy where my pencil sketches have smudged on to the other page, or where glue has stuck to the wrong parts of the page. I do try to make things look nice but I quite often get so caught up in actually producing the work and writing the annotations that I don’t focus enough on how I put it all together on the page. I hope I don’t miss out on too many marks because of this. Maybe I should start wearing gloves when I stick things in my sketchbook, it would stop me making marks on the page where my fingers have touched, or put pieces of scrap paper over pencil sketches to protect my sketchbook pages. I guess a fixative spray could work too, but it’d have to be one that wouldn’t change the colours or anything about the sketches. I should really look into getting some fixative spray and maybe write a review of it on the blog… is that something I could put on this blog?? I don’t know, why not.

Hopefully by the end of next week I will have handed in the project and everything will be all well and good, after which I’ll be straight on to the next project, there aren’t many breaks in 2nd year I’ve noticed, even when we aren’t in uni we’re doing some sort of project.. well, I am anyway, I’m not sure how other people on the course work but for me it’s pretty much non stop. I guess I like it that way, it gives me something to do and I feel like I’ll be able to become a professional illustrator someday if I keep putting the work in.

Tutorial Week

| Rolo

Over the weekend, ahead of tutorial that I felt was looming over me, worrying that I had not done enough, I finally decided to make a proper start on my character development board. Had it not taken me so long to refine my Skaadi poses, I probably would have started them sooner. Nevertheless, I made a start on the first board, I displayed both the refined Skaadi dynamic pose and the side pose, alongside her small arsenal of weapons and her treasured necklace; for the text I decided to show Skaadi’s character profile, rather than the whole story because I wanted the board to be just about her. After much deliberation and minor alterations, I just couldn’t get the layout to look professional, my illustrations looked a bit haphazardly placed and the board didn’t look neat.  In hindsight I probably should have spent more time looking at how other Illustrators laid out their character boards; but I was running out of time and panicking, I really wanted to have something to show my tutors for when my tutorial came on the fast approaching Monday.

My first attempt at creating a character board.
CareHere. (2019). Featured App-Stop, Breathe & Think. [online] Available at: https://carehere.com/stop-breath-think/ [Accessed 24 Oct. 2019].

Monday came and my time was up, I had to go in and face the tutorial. When I got there, Sarah (one of my tutors) was surprisingly happy with the amount of work I had done over the week off and offered me some guidance on how I could improve the layout of my development board, things such as making the character profile categories stand out from the rest of the text and laying out all of my illustrations so that they formed a straight line across the centre of the board; this is something that was mentioned to the class earlier in the project but I guess it slipped my mind, I do have trouble focusing on what is being said to me, primarily when the tutors are speaking to the whole class, my mind tends to wander off. It is paramount that I work on being present in the moment when I am in class because I won’t always get the chance to speak to my tutors one to one, I can’t avoid group talks and class conversations, and while I can’t help getting a bit anxious and close in on myself in those environments, there are ways I can improve it. Perhaps I could try mindfulness again, I used to sometimes use the Stop, Breath & Think app which did help, i’ve heard the Headspace app is a really good one to use too, maybe I could try it and share my thoughts on whether it works for me.

Skaadi’s legs just don’t look right.

Anyway, getting a bit off topic, as well as talking about my character board, we also talked about my final illustration, more specifically, how the dynamic Skaadi illustration would fit into the environment that I created over the weekend. After placing Skaadi into the environment it became rather clear that she didn’t quite make sense in the piece, it was pointed out to me that her legs were facing the wrong direction as they should be leading the viewer up the path; I had kept her legs side on in the hope that I wouldn’t need to change a pose that I had spent so much time on refining. It has been a few days since my tutorial and I am still struggling to change the position of her legs and I’m growing increasingly worried that I might have to change her whole body in order for my final illustration to make sense, a task that I’m not sure I have time left to do as the deadline for this project is only a week away. I’m going to try and get my girlfriend to act out the same dynamic pose as before, but with her legs in a different position so that I have some good first hand reference images to get a better idea of how I should draw Skaadi’s legs in a such a way that she is leading the audience up the path. I really hope that I am able to achieve this over the coming weekend so that I can focus on finalising the overall illustration and finishing the character boards from Monday. If not, I will have to redraw her whole body which could trip me up on the last hurdle of the project, watch this space.