Friday, January 20, 2012

House print blog

I've set up a new blog to show the house prints here

No.3 is on the desk at the mo an should be posted up there early next week... :-)

Monday, January 9, 2012

new project thing

A couple of years ago i set myself the artistic task of documenting a year's worth of bus trips with lino prints.

it was a good thing to have undertaken, but i decided not to burden myself with anything similar in 2011... :-)

however, this year i'm itching for a bit of a challenge again, and so here's 2012's slightly obsessive project - drawing and producing a print of one local house each week.

because of a dodgy knee/general portliness issues, i'm supposed to be walking for 30mins a day, so the idea is to get out and about and try to engage with the local area a bit more and to make that part of the exercise.
also back in my college days a wise old tutor got me to drawing buildings and bits of architecture, and i'd like to get back to that.
there are some interesting houses fairly close to us here, so i'm looking forward to getting out and looking for them.

the idea is to do them in number order, so the first week's print will feature a building with the house number one, right through to a number fifty-two in the final week of the year.

each print will have some text on it too.
i bought an ipod in the autumn, and i'll be listening to that as i draw. i'll incorporate some lyrics that stand out in the finished image. it'll be interesting to see how the image and the text work alongside each other - whether the words suggest some sort of narrative [or maybe they won't...]

i'll blog each print on here with a tracklisting and some thoughts on how it's all going...



so here's number one. it's what you see as you walk up our road, and there's a bench on the corner so i sat there to draw it.
the quote is from 'to earth with love' by gay dad, and making the drawings reminded me just how out of practice i am when it comes to observational drawing - i was having to concentrate so hard that i wasn't really listening to the ipod.
i used photos on the phone to help me back in the studio, but i'm hoping that as the project goes on i'll use the camera less and rely on my drawings more.

soundtrack:
'beach party' by jonny
'will you?' by hazel o'connor
'emily kane' by art brut
'silent sigh' by badly drawn boy
'we never talked' by nina nastasia
'bros' by panda bear
'she just coukldn't stay' by trembling blue stars
'the final arrears' by mull historical society
'to earth with love' by gay dad