Tag: red book
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Red Book drawing number 33. First use of enlarged thermal printer marks in a drawing.
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I have been picking away at this one over a few short sessions — while making coffee. The black structured forms follow the mostly hidden text that was on the page. I think I’ll be pulling some of the enlarged thermal print images into this so I am curious to see how that feels. I…
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This is exactly why I was interested in thermal prints. There’s a whole complex world of marks and matrices as I enlarge and then enlarge again (and again!).
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Made some 200% enlarged copies of the thermal prints. Fun to make secondary drawings on the copied versions. I’ll try also making some 400% copies next just to really zoom in on the pure texture and move passed the frame of the original drawings.
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We recently bought a few low cost and low quality ways to make thermal prints. It was an idea my partner Gayla and I both had for some time without either of us acting upon it. We both wanted a form of low committal analogue output to use in a variety of not fully discovered…
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Red Book drawing 32 This one is thick with paper and paint layers. At one point the yellow and orange paint was very dominant as it has been in previous drawings but I wanted to try pushing that back and so I brushed on and then scraped away some white gesso. It made things extra…
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This is the 30th drawing in the Red Book. I was both looking forward to drawing on this page and also had a certain level of anxiety. The photo at the top of Jesse Owens in mid jump is such a powerful image to react to that I knew I would want it to stay…
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I shared a number of my recent drawings with some friends and it was a nice reminder to keep how and when I share what I do a wide circle. For me at least, I do better at being kind to myself and making more things that feel good to me when I share aspects…
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Because the book that forms the container/surface for the Red Book drawings is a 1976 Olympics commemorative book, it’s not surprising that some of the existing photos and illustrations are sports related. That aspect has nothing to do with why I chose this book to work in and in many contradictory ways I want to…
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Red Book 28 I wanted to be blocky and messy and I got messy for sure. There were more heavy black shapes initially but the impulse to make grids won out.
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I have posted a new video with a casual progress report about my Red Book project. I talk through the first 25 drawings and demonstrate how I react to the active surface of the pages as I draw. https://youtu.be/hVGbgsYXDWc?si=_o9UuteJ5F45VgQf
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Drawing 26 in the Red Book
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Red Book 25
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Open Again This is drawing number 24 in the Red Book, my current active surface drawing project. Some of the last marks I added to this as I finished it this morning were two lists of five words. Lists of words have been common in my drawings over the last 10 years. I enjoy the…
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I think soon I will sit down at this table and spend more than two minutes making marks. But before then, it is good to still stand here for two minutes to draw grid lines and paste down paper towards something. Marks and motion towards something are better than receding away from things.
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Other than some work-related sketching, I hadn’t engaged in making anything visual since the beginning of January. My last time sitting at my work table was literally on January 1st. There have been things that felt like barriers — most of them of my own creation. There has been grief and frustration with myself and…
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Sometimes I just end up smearing things around for a while to see what sticks. Nothing sticking on this one yet.
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The original page’s text in red, Citius Altius Fortius means Faster Higher Stronger in Latin. Not exactly a credo I would put much stock in. Which is probably why my reaction was the downer We Fade text. Sorry, Olympians.
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After finishing my previous drawing, Truly, in the Red Book last night, I went directly to the next page to start a new drawing. The underlying pages are quite different with the new page being mostly white space with stronger header text. I am only making drawings on the right hand pages in this book…
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Red Book 20
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I’m part way through this drawing in the Red Book. I think the stripes up top are too dominant in this case so I’ll likely either tone them down or cover them completely.
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Initial mark making for a new drawing in the Red Book. Orange is one of my favourite colours to work with. The existing book page didn’t have much to respond to but I still quickly read through the text to see if words or phrases spark something. That’s part of what I like about starting…
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Latest drawing in the Red Book.
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A new quick start for a drawing in the Red Book. You can see the “blank” page in the second photo. The pages that have strong pre-existing images are interesting because depending on the image, my initial urge is to either highlight or obscure.
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This is the 16th drawing in the Red Book. I started this page with some loose “blackout poetry” that provided the main phrase that I later added with some vintage white Letraset. I found a thick roll of heavy striped wrapping paper at the thrift store and I love the high-contrast punch it adds. I…
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Bombs that land without being dropped. A peace prize for casual violence. A sprawling social landscape without people. Notwithstanding a human heart.
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This page in the Red Book was interesting not only because it was mostly blank but because the part that was printed had such a strong piece of text to react to. As I’ve said before, my primary reason for working in a printed book like this is the “active ground” of each page. There’s…
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I finished this drawing in a second sitting this morning. In part, it was a good test of some new materials. It was also a nice chance to work with what was on the page. There are only two collage fragments added since the two pre-existing photos are like readymade collage in this case. This…
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This page has two strong photos that already have colour palettes in line with colours I tend to work with. That’s part of the excitement of working with an active base like this. There are both frictions and possible harmonies in how I might react to the surface. Watch me working on this drawing here:…
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I thought I would post a video showing the first pass at a drawing in this project book. The video is unedited and real time. I don’t talk in the video but there’s some scratchy and thunky mark making ASMR sounds in there. Watch on YouTube.
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Because of some materials choices, this drawing ended up a bit weirder and maybe muddier than I might have hoped. But it has its own charms. I did want to do something with the applied grid that counter-balanced the cathedral photo from the original page and I like it in that respect. I also like…
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Trying out a few thrift store art supplies on this drawing. The collage items are older junk shop papers a bunch of which were from a watchmaker’s archives: blueprints, receipts, and manuals. I have regrets from that time years ago because the shop had binders full of materials I didn’t buy. Ah well… The newer…
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Each page in the Red Book (it’s a repurposed commemorative book from the 1976 Montreal Olympics) has something different to react to when I draw. That’s the core of working in a book that already had a purpose before becoming a substrate for something else. Some pages won’t give much in terms of prompting and…
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The sixth drawing in the Red Book came together in one sitting. I started this book project with the loose goal of taking more time with each drawing. But I purposely didn’t make it a rule because I didn’t think that would be a healthy constraint. Because this page had a strong photographic image and…
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Drawing five in the Red Book. This one started with very little on the original printed page. I left the word “City” while applying gesso to the rest of the page and then drew a grid over the whole of the page. The title Sampler comes from the broken series of letters and numbers I…
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The spreads will often be weird/interesting in this project book since I am leaving the left hand pages as they are. So there’s a little play with the original form of this book and my drawings on each right hand page. The text, “life is made of smallest fragments” is from one of the vintage…
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This is the fourth drawing in the Red Book. I am finding that even the simplest page layout in the underlying book makes for something good to react to. I had an initial worry that showing too much of the text would be distracting but it just becomes texture. Words are just mark making that…
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Work in progress in the Red Book. This doesn’t have much more to go but it got late so I’ll come back to it tomorrow. This uses a handmade rough cut circle stencil for the main dots.
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I finished Golden Bone from the Red Book tonight. Got to a point where ai felt like I made a few marks too many but with this kind of work, there’s not really any going back. I still like the colours, the general structure, and the text.
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Continued work on this third drawing in the Red Book. I used more extremely crumbling ancient Letraset on this one. I sprayed it with a casein-based non-aerosol fixative to prevent the letters from entirely flaking off over time. I like the look of the instantly distressed type.
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Started on a third drawing in the Red Book and it’s the first one to have a dominant image in the background to react to. Because the photo is a portrait of a person (Lord Killanin head of the IOC at the time) it makes reacting a bit more intentional. I don’t know or think…
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Here’s the second completed drawing in the Red Book. I’m learning what’s it’s like to draw on this somewhat glossy paper. I’m also beginning to make choices about what elements from the book’s content I cover and which I incorporate. Because this was the title page and this book has a modernist grid, there wasn’t…
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Because the Red Book is an existing 1976 Olympics commemorative book, the date is likely to come up frequently on the pages. I was seven years old in 1976 and I feel like that year is going to inform some of these drawings in a way I can’t be conscious of just yet.
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This is the first complete drawing in my Red Book project. I found it was harder to establish when/how to end given my self-assigned experiment to not complete these drawings in single sittings. I’m also getting the feel for how the pages in this book will receive various media for better or for worse.
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Here’s me drawing in the new Red Book art book project. As I say in the video, I’m trying something with this book where I don’t finish drawings in single sittings as I normally do. This is the third (I think) time I have come back to this particular drawing. It might be done? But…
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A few more marks made on this first drawing in the Red Book. 📕 It’s already interesting to sit and then remove myself from a drawing without finishing it. Not exactly comfortable but it pushes me in an intriguing way.