Road and Pavement Works

Collected pavement markings for road/pavement works that were due. I really liked the use of bright oranges and limish greens at the bottom to pinpoint drainage points. Quite powerful colours. 

More on this later.

Tacked It

Photographed my wall before carefully taking down every inch of collected and found materials that appealed to me through colour and so on, to start fresh this year coming up and try to keep it as a monthly thing. Collect, stick, photograph and then peel off at the end of the month. Could this in itself become a live board of inspiration? A collectors board of stuff, graphics, colour, prints, textures, looking at materiality within the everyday?

I miss have an artist's studio which is seperate from coming home from work and just resting (not that I have time for that - nor does anyone really). If I struggle to find time to create, paint or stitch, I can at least collect?
Maybe have it all stitched together into some kind of mixed media collage board by the end?

Sketching text pointers

In charcoal is so much fun! Then even more fun with pen, no really, it is. 

Except for the O, S, G, Q, it's working out. 

I need to work on drawing up those letters though, 

that and proportion. 

Dig out squared paper and enlargement technique maybe.

 Also must work on stuff in the mornings, night light is not so good. 

Pointers for drawing/sketching text: 

Look at each letter individually.
Note shapes of each line.
Look at negative and positive space.
Note round shapes. How round is round? Slightly angled in places? 

Look at serif/sans serif where edges of text are, are they rounded, or blunt edges?
Look at proportion, is it accurate?
Spacing one letter and then the next, spaces between consistent with font spacing, which often is not the same as leaving a gap of a few millimeters between each letter.
Use pen or pencil as measuring device.

Be quick with sketches first.
Lightly sketch top and bottom and mid section guidelines (wish I'd done this above).

Collage and text work

Work on this text based project is going way too slowly at the moment, 

I need to figure out how to move forward with this text. 

Now that I am working on a larger piece using image maker, 

I'm finding it tricky to stick to text only, 

should I be incorperating colour and motifs too? 

Graphics, clouds and stars?  

So this is a start at exploring such options by

using magazine imagery and some quick drawings.

Collecting text onto paper to photocopy for some 

image maker based work that is on-going: 

Black and Blue - an inspirational zine

Words have become my constant, as an artist and writer.
At last.

The above images are from a zine I created specifically for a writer at Nanowrimo during the July campnanowrimo. I will upload it at some point and have it available online hopefully, but if anyone would like to have a digital copy just send me a message or leave a comment.
Spent a full day working on the zine and then putting it together was an interesting process, playing with and resizing images and text so the file was a smaller size and easily transferable. 
Idea of the zine is that is it an inspiring goodybag with images and words and phrases. Black and Blue is a play on that idea of physcially being beaten, a great metaphor, but one I wanted to soften and maybe tilt onto its head, implying that the process of writing can somtimes make you sore and leave you with bruises or areas that are are sesntitive too.
Again note the play with fonts and found words.