Monthly Archives: September 2008

Knotwork, interlace, & illumination

By Somhairle | Published: September 23, 2008

Interlace art in sculpture (5Mb pdf) Wikipedia on Insular art – the fusion of Viking/Celtic knotwork, Germanic animal-style, and Christianity. I need to try some of this. Specifically, something like this…

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Ink over acrylic, pt 3

By Somhairle | Published: September 23, 2008

Further to last, you won’t be seeing a scan of the failed print after all – it occurred to me that I had some clay shaper tools lying around, and that they might work nicely for applying printer’s ink by hand. It turns out that yes, they do, so I laid some of that over [...]

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Printing over acrylic, pt 2

By Somhairle | Published: September 23, 2008

It looks like the ink transfer from the block to the paper is much more sensitive to bumps in the paper surface than it is to the permeability or otherwise – I prepared a silver-blue background the other day, on black handmade paper with quite a rough texture, and even quite a thick layer of [...]

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Trafalgar Square, redux

By Somhairle | Published: September 21, 2008

Further to my post on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, something else occurred to me when I walked past on my way from Waterloo to Charing Cross Road on Friday – having sculptures which are explicitly designed to be temporary means artists have a much wider choice of materials. Model for a Hotel 2007 [...]

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Pentagram print, & failures

By Somhairle | Published: September 16, 2008

I did this last night, on some faux-parchment paper I had lying around. It’s done with Japanese carving vinyl, and I’m quite pleased with the way most of it turned out – the four styles of interlocking lines distinguish themselves nicely, and I managed to get cutlines where I wanted them and not where I [...]

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And nightingales sang in Trafalgar Square

By Somhairle | Published: September 15, 2008

More from the Guardian – something else to disagree with from Jonathan Jones, in fact. Trafalgar Square is one of London’s noisy, dirty, congested, wonderful hearts, and there are four plinths surrounding Nelson’s Column. Three are surmounted by statues of a king (George IV) and two generals (Henry Havelock and Sir Charles James Napier), and [...]

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Science & art, again

By Somhairle | Published: September 15, 2008

I’ve finally got around to reading through the backlog of Guardian arts column articles I had piled up, so here’s some more commentary for you! This is another by the usually-reliable Jonathan Jones – reliable in that he’s almost always flat-out wrong. He’s terribly disappointed in the limited scope and basic crapness of the artists, [...]

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Mixed-media Lammas print

By Somhairle | Published: September 5, 2008

After this, I decided to try printing onto an acrylic-painted surface. It turns out that it works rather well, but takes quite a bit longer to dry – I suspect I can generalize from that to say that the drying time depends on the absorbency of the paper beneath. Here is the result, which is [...]

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GIMP

By Somhairle | Published: September 5, 2008

I’ve been using the GIMP for quite a while, so I was rather interested to see this review from Dave at Scriptorium. As far as free software goes (in the FOSS sense, rather than the strictly literal send-no-money-now sense), the GIMP is pretty damn good. However, as free software tends to be, it’s designed (in [...]

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