I am halfway through the task of illustrating ‘Blakes Road‘, the book I am currently writing. I’m illustrating the book as it is, in part, a paean to William Blake, and Blake illuminated almost every page of his own books, so I feel I should do the same.
Here are a few of them:
Playing football last Friday I broke the little finger of my left hand. The bone has also twisted, meaning that I might need surgery to straighten it. This means my left hand is more or less useless. Just living simply becomes a chore. Anything involving water is particularly tough, the hardest two tasks are washing up and shampooing my hair. But more or less every activity involves both hands, I have sadly discovered.
there have been a few times over the past few years when i come on here and apologised about being busy and not being able to update as often as i would have liked to. i have again been idiotically busy these last few weeks but i have to say for once not with tiresome domestic or business matters. true, i have been working evenings and weekends for my present client, but i’ve also been tramping through london’s abandoned dockyards, building impromptu beach sculpture, dreaming up a truly genius idea for public artwork and creating my first truly awesome piece of generative art. not bad for a damp february! i also built an art-game late last year that i haven’t had the chance to release yet!
i’ve been desperate to blog about it all but really just haven’t had any time. i mean, it’s nearly midnight now and i’ve done nowt but code and sleep for days, weeks. i’ve been doing the high-pressure freelance paying gigs so solidly for the past 6 months that it’s beginning to affect my health and so next week, when my present contract finishes, i’m hoping to get away for a few days of r&r and document all this. just a simple room in a b&b in some anonymous town somewhere. yeah, just me… and my mac… and a wifi connection… and a box of k-nex, my sketchbook, camera, stop-motion animation software, a duffle bag of science, art, software & mathematics textbooks and my favourite faber-castell drawing pens! :)
earlier i was thinking about the way i draw. in order to find the position of the next point in the drawing i compare whatever part of the object i’m currently looking at along a horizontal x-axis and a vertical y-axis to other nearby visual anchor points to be as sure as i can that the drawing is accurate. i put a mental grid over the scene.
two days ago i went to a life drawing session, the first i have been to for roughly 13 years. having experimented with cubic still life i was keen to explore cubic life drawing, the realisation of the human form… in boxes!
this is the most striking piece from the session. despite the angular treatment i find a good deal of grace and humanity in the pose. it has a quiet architectural aura, like an crane on a construction site at night. it occurred to me, as i was visualising the way the left leg box and the lower torso box intersected, that i could draw live from the nude using a laptop.
this is an idea i hope to explore later on.