My Work This Week

Somehow, I’ve managed to finish all the work I was expecting to do this week – earlier than I thought as well. I’ll be leaving for France tomorrow morning at some ungodly hour so that most of the 12 hour drive down to the town my family come from will be spent in sunlight, which I’m not looking forward to in the first place and especially not considering the clocks go back so I’ll be losing a good hour’s sleep – boo hoo hoo.

But I’m finally done with the print work I can feasibly do away from the studio, so that’s no longer a worry – or as much as it was previously. By some miracle, I even managed to use the whole metre of the fabric I bought to bind the books together so there really wasn’t that much waste. And I’m quite proud of them really, they almost look like actual books: one as a wrap-up book and the other 2 as generic ones. Though one of those I’m going to be keeping for myself and for use on displays that was a bit flimsy due to the less-than-appropiate card and my own stupidity. I’ve also crafted a few tunnel books for print-outs of my “Fae Stealing Baby” prints that have actually come out relatively nicely, and could probably be sold when I do my exhibitions as cheap post, general or artist information cards.

I’ve also got all the preliminary and compositional studies from my Illustration project done and ready, so that while I’m at my house I can crack on with painting the so hopefully – when I get back on the 8th of April – I’ll have a decent bit to show for myself, if not all the final images painted up and ready to put into my portfolio for this semester’s assessment. That is if the head of the course doesn’t tell me that it’s all wrong and to live on a rack in someone’s basement until I’ve matured into a proper, palatable human being who doesn’t draw dead people all the time.

Successfully Being Unsuccessful – a Day Late

I have succeeded in doing a grand total of pretty much bugger-all this week – probably helped along by the fact that I spent Monday to Wednesday telling myself that I shouldn’t do anything so that I didn’t have to do any unnecessary extra cleaning and packing before I left – not a good move, I know, but I can be very persuasive. But I’m back home now and, frankly, it’s been nice to have an actual break even if it does come with a pinch of guilt, a smidgen of Oh-God-how-far-behind-am-I-going-to-be-when-I-actually-start-again and a handful of creeps who seem to think my whole life’s purpose is to spend a night in their bed.

Despite my lack of new work (more precisely, Illustration work), I have managed knock together some of my fairy prints, which I am suitably pleased with. Or at least to the extent that I’ll put them on the internet without too much internal shame. I think one of the only flaws with the double-plate Tuile des Fées prints are the they are a bit grubby around the edges and the plates seemed to very consistently misregister. The aquatint appears to have come out a lot worse than the other, due to poor technical presentation like the fact that the central figure in the image looks like they spend all their free time eating bees – when they’re not stealing babies or blighting the harvest, of course – but I’m willing to overlook that because, well, a print’s a print and I’m sure somewhere out there, someone has produced something worse.

To go with this week’s time-wasting antics, I’ve also very effectively wasted my money as well, in the name of alcohol, curry and 3 metres of dark blue velvet that I really do not need – even if it is the most beautiful length of fabric I’ve ever seen and I’m planning on turning it into the most pretentious cape if I ever find the time.

Another Exciting Week

I’ve spent most of today packing and tidying my room ready to go home on Thursday before the weekend/holiday rush starts and turns a 6 hour drive into a 10 hour one. I even invested in some little crates for my art stuff so it’s not lying around in a collapsed hanging basket on my floor – something I probably should have done about 6 months ago when I moved in but hey, it’s done now – which means I no longer need sonar to navigate my room at night, wehey! Though I am actually feeling pretty hyped to be going back, it’ll be a nice break and I’m looking forward to some real intellectual conversation which doesn’t consist of “But what if there was a whole planet filled with talking dogs” and “Henry VIII wasn’t a Victorian?”. I think the only thing I’m not going to enjoy about the whole trip is the bit where I have to cross the 10th circle of hell, better known as the M25, at rush hour.

In terms of art, I’ve got a fair amount done, but to an extent I feel a bit like I probably should have done more but there’s not much I can do to change that now. Even so, I have all my linocuts printed up onto good paper, ready to be cut up and used as the frames for my book’s text when I get time either late this week coming or early next, and I’ve finally got the illustrations in lithograph printed – which came out pretty well, all things considered, and I even managed to print most of them myself without cutting my fingers off or breaking the press. Now that that’s done I think I’m going to start working on some more Tuile des Fées related etchings, probably better described as good old traditional fairies such as the acclaimed “Fae stealing your baby and replacing it with a stick” or variations thereof.

My Illustration work hasn’t progressed much from last week, however. I did manage to finish the final illustration for the 1st Project. But once again, I’m not entirely please with it and I think it could do with a bit more work and possibly something to fix the perspective that seems to be a little bit off around his left arm and his head, but I’ll probably tweak that if I have time at the end of the semester before hand-in. Otherwise, I’ve started doing a couple of pictures for the 2nd Project sketchbook and I’m getting there with my ideas for the 3rd Project: 3 full colour illustrations of one of Malcolm Pryce’s detective novels, based in Aberystwyth. I’ve decided I’m going to do all the dead people in “From Aberystwyth with Love” and a few extra little ones of the area for scene-setting as the head of the subject doesn’t seem to be too enthusiastic about the fact that the dead people won’t exactly be giving a feel of the town, despite the fact that he wants the images to be of consequence to the story, which I can’t exactly say pretty sunsets will be. But I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

Besides that, I did manage to get a few quite nice monoprints done in my Life Drawing class on Tuesday that I am pretty pleased with, and that work quite nicely as small sets of prints, using a variety of different papers I had left over in my drawer, which can probably be presented as such in my portfolio assessment in early May.

This Week in My Fun, Action-Packed Life

This week has been a productive one – or I like to believe it has, though I’m not quite sure if that’s because it has been in truth or if my sky-rocketing stress levels have finally rendered me slighty psychotic and I’ve lost all perception of time. On the plus side, my weight has started to level out after dropping at a slightly alarming rate for the past month and I’m feeling a lot better in myself all round. I’m sure the fact that I actually went food shopping this week and now have more than a tub of butter and a quarter of a 4 month old saucisson in my fridge has helped. Though as always, life isn’t short of unnecessary drama: this time in the form of our housemate’s girlfriend who seems to have a knack for telling tales about us to our friends and generally being a bit of a manipulative cow (to put it as nicely as possible).

However, my Tom Waits “What’s He Building in There?”: The Taxidermy Head of an Unfortunate Intruder Illustration project seems to be coming along nicely. The second image is pretty much finished aside from a few alterations I have to make in tone around the floor and wall areas, if you ignore the fact that I monumentally balls-ed up her face and would rather not think about it or restart because, genuinely, who has the time?

And the third image is well underway. I should be finishing it tomorrow evening or some time on Monday if I spend all day working on it, having already prepared the paper for inking and done all my preliminary sketches and compositional studies previously in the week. I probably feel the most optimistic about how this one’s going to turn out: I like the selected viewpoint and I think it’s placement in the story it probably the most interesting (and actually means that there’s a story to read through as opposed to the sudden jump from “murderous taxidermist at the bottom of the stairs” to “head on the wall about his fireplace”) showing the man in the process of taxidermy. My ideas are as cheerful and pleasant as ever, I know.

This week I’ve also made decent headway on my Printmaking project. I’ve began on a photo-etching of La Tuile des Fées, an ancient burial chamber near where my family comes from in France, said to be an entrance to the underworld hence the name, to go with my theme of folklore and folkmusic. I’m still unsure whether to get another plate and etch it to illustrate a scene, or at least a fairy to give the image some precedence and context among the others, or to simply leave it as it is and hope the title speaks for itself. Aside from that, the images for The Forsaken Mermaid book are all almost ready to be printed. The linocuts to frame the text of the song are finished and ready to go – I’ve already printed some proofs on regular printer paper and they haven’t come out as awfully as I feared they might so I think I’m set in that respect – and the lithographs to illustrate three of the scenes of the story have been drawn onto the stone and first etched, one already printed about a week ago, so hopefully they’ll be inked and printed by Wednesday and I’ll be able to arrange the books during the Easter holiday.

That or I could sell everything I own and move into a shed in the middle of nowhere, eating squirrels and revelling in the fact that I don’t have any commitments or University deadlines.