Monday 18 October 2010

places to visit...

in Manchester I am often found in Richard Goodall Gallery, Travelling Man, Magma or Forbidden Planet... buying copious amounts of arty books, magazines, comics and toys.. so.. even though I should be researching studio/portfolio visits in Berlin... I have already been looking for places to go.. here is one ;)

Mickey test prints + ashley

I often find I just need to start doing something in order for a project to progress.. you can sit there procrastinating or just trying to develop ideas further but ultimately... you just have to do something... and I did...

took my Everlasting Mickey design and set him up for screenprinting :P I LOVE IT!!!





and this is what Ash Newall was working on.. (photos are for his benefit)...

Sunday 17 October 2010

Don't Panic... yet

Finally got my hands on my D&AD/Don't Panic poster today... I wasn't too sure how I receive these.. i was half hoping I'd get 10-15 of the brown paper wallets normally available.. but I was sent 40 prints direct from London.

I get to keep hold of 10 of them (although I was told 20 originally) but I have signed and numbered 30 of them which are to be sent back down to London and then sold (apparently) :D woo.. i almost feel professional.. almost..


Artefact(s)

I need to have something sorted before I go to Berlin in November apparently.. so although I still want to do a vinyl figure of my own design, I know time wise I'm probably not going to manage it... I was however thinking about a keyring similar to the ones Kidrobot are producing...




I realised that I want to make stuff similar to the kind of things I like to buy for myself! So far, I can only imagine making a custom keyring design in a similar fashion to how I'd make the vinyl figure... sculpting a design with sculpey, baking it, creating a mold and then casting a small run of them... but I'd need to think about the shape/design and whether I'd need to paint them... painting something like 50 individual keyrings could be rather tedious... so I'd have to make sure the design works simply in a single colour. I have however already been pricing up bulk lots of keychains :)



the stickers WILL be happening this week though! ;)


Nobrow

i recently picked up a copy of Nobrow magazine no.3 for two reasons.. the first being that i know they have featured and printed the work of Ben Newman in the past and secondly because they seem to be very popular in an underground fanzine kind of way. (i like Ben Newman's work btw).





A few of us have kicked around the idea of printing our own fanzine/magazine since we were introduced to Le Gun....This was so we could just get our work out there to the world... each having 4-5 pages and that would be it. something for the portfolio and not linked with the briefs we received during the course, a way for us to say what we want and do what we want.

Nobrow allows artists to showcase their work in a printed format - which reminds me of the Paper Tigers essay featured in Varoom no. 10 - but it seems to be fitting to a current trend of naive art becoming popular rather than out of a love for the method/process of printing a magazine. Le Gun, started out printing their own work and then running printing submissions as awareness grew... they bought their first printing press themselves and did limited edition runs, where as Nobrow only number their first 3000. Im not saying Nobrow is wrong in what they do, only that it is different.

I imagine that if we get our shit together and produce illustrations that we want to print in a book then I'd want to hand bind and bound them. I've made a few little, simple booklets in the past and I also found a great tutorial via GigPosters.com on how to bind and make covers for books : http://www.gigposters.com/forums/process/138307-process-making-some-books.html



and also found a few others since:


cd case printing: http://www.gigposters.com/forums/process/150339-my-first-print-cd-cases.html

its nice to see the process people go through during screen printing.. its what appeals to me I think.. the fact that you need to figure the order in which to print your work, you build a design up over layers and its a hand on approach.. (im slowly losing interest in over using digital methods to produce work)...