COLLEGE PROJECT

Can't say too much about this yet as I don't sufficiently understand it myself, but here's a bunch of sketches etc from my big project for my MA.

It's very much Work in Progress at the moment, and is something to do with the idea of the City as a centre of financial (mis)management.

This is playing with an idea of Debt as some kind soul-sapping louse or parasite.

Sketches from the documentary Inside Job.

LEVIATHAN STRIKES!

This joke is obscure even by the standards of comics geekery, but I had to get it out of my system.

(As some kind of justification, it references two of my favourite writers, from very different forms of comics, Grant Morrison and Peter Blegvad). 


Hm, I'd better do some work for college, eh?

ETCH A SKETCH!

I got to try some etching towards the end of last year, but as the results ended up as Xmas presents I haven't been able to blog about them until now.

I got to try two slightly different techniques, with a soft and hard ground (the waxy stuff that you roll on to the metal plate and actually etch into).

Here's my first go, on a soft ground on a steel plate. The soft ground picks up lots of texture so you can use it to get patterns from material, or, in my case, thumb prints!

It's the legendary and late Humphrey Lyttelton, jazz trumpeter and presenter of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. My lucky Dad got this picture.

The hard ground gives you a cleaner, more cross-hatchy style, more like I'd thought of as an etching, so I decided to do an etched interpretation of William Blake, Taxi Driver. This is William on a hard ground on a zinc plate.

I thought it would be interesting to experiment with hand-tinting the Blake prints with water-colours (as Blake did in some of his illuminated books) but it's a lot harder than it looks!

It all went a bit clown colours on this one so I had another go with a calmer palette, thus!

Much happier with this one, so I gave this one to my Mum.

So, a really interesting process. I'm looking forward to getting back in the etching studio, trying out some more and figuring out how to incorporate it into my BIG PROJECT.

Happy New Fear...

I've been trying to think through my BIG PROJECT for college and wound myself up into a bit of a state, something like this:

I think I made a bit of a breakthrough today so should be more positive stuff on its way! Got a lot of drawing to do over the next few days...