I’ve realized I just cannot resist temptation to create a decent image of the non-sketchbook explorations. This cam experimenter called out for a graphic semi-abstract representation, and I’m an artist with a camera so what else should I do? Good job I ran a cam experiment is all I can say. It emphasizes the need for meticulous vertical drilling of the follower holes. That should be a decent challenge for tomorrow. #creativity #Failure #Postaday2012 #risk

Absurd to make a to do list for a weekend when I’m away and then think I can make something happen. Particularly when the to do list starts to compete for headspace with drawing possibilities. All I can do is struggle on. I realise I could work through these forms in a fraction of the time using the iPad or Photoshop but I’m stubbornly sticking to my vow to eschew easy fix no fail computer wizardry as I draw and redraw the figures from my head. I must remember to take the chu

Confronting the dreaded hands. Pages of drawing required so I can move to the watercolor drawing with fluid, instinctive lines and washes. Deconstructing the form of the hand; where are the bones, the muscles, the tendons likely to be? How far can I manipulate the movements and character? What is the exact relationship to the face normally, and to what extent should this be distorted to say what I want to say? #creativity #Failure #Postaday2012 #risk

My head is dangerously full of 3D movements options; gears, cams, sprockets and belts. I am unable to think about anything else which is making daily life pretty impossible and driving the car positively insane. I find some of my best ideas hit me when cruising the streets of Leeds, so construction ideas come thick and fast as I shoot along the inner ring road. But building a puppet theatre in my head at the wheel is decidedly inadvisable. I have chopped and sawn and assemble

It’s funny how ideas evolve. This blog series for example: I had no real Idea of what was going to happen, what I was going to post, but I’m happy so far that it’s establishing some firm of direction on this exploration of risk, play and creativity. I’m appreciative of all the comments I’ve had, and it’s lovely to have conversations about this aspect of making art which I find so fascinating. Today has been spent messing with fixing methods for limbs. And more playing with p

Running apace now on multiple fronts. Still messing for the shadow puppets, starting to assemble the actual puppet and busy drawing specs and sourcing materials for the whole ensemble. A frantic pace, and I’m still sorting out bedrooms in between productive moments. And I need to start testing materials of all sorts tomorrow. I must have raised technical queries with about half a dozen suppliers of products ranging from translucent screening material and styrene channels thro

Exploration is aways a challenge on busy days, but I have a serious deadline to meet at the end of the next week which isn’t disappearing and if I think about the fact I have two bedrooms to empty and clear and put back together again in this time I could happily stick my head in a paper bag and give up altogether. But I’m not going to do that and against all the odds I’m determined to see through this puppet/automata project. So I’m frantically playing with air-drying clay a

The entire day was almost a #dailyfail after falling back to sleep when I should have been up and about. Creativity was hampered by printer problems (yes, oh yes, the bitter irony given my distancing from technology for creative purposes) because I had source material on my iPad I thought it would be fun to print out. I have a low threshold for fun. So I had all of three minutes to play around with some water soluble pastel pencils I found lurking in a drawer. A deeper searc

An extremely satisfying set of fails today which is encouraging for resolving this piece over the next few days. Inspired by a workshop I did in December at The Art House in Wakefield, I eventually got around today to putting aside puppet and stage manufacture and turned to a mono printing session. The uncontrollability of the first few passes and mixing of techniques means that nothing is as expected and every time the paper is pulled away, I get a fresh insight into what ma

Woke in a panic this morning. Too many deadlines approaching, and I need to move up a few gears. So instead of rushing into the studio, I took time out to go and sit and make lists of what I needed to do and source. This required crystallising some technical bits for staging and presentation of one artwork I’m working on. So it was a process of drawing diagrams and becoming lost in 3D imaginary projections and working through how things would fit together. It works on paper.

I’m becoming a bit more relaxed each day posting the normally hidden pages of my sketchbook and related messings. Working in a open plan studio is something I’m used to, and that’s very exposing, but it’s still possible to hide stuff you can’t bear the idea of other people seeing. But I’ve reached a point already where I’m able to step back from the immediacy of unsatisfactory result, and recognise it as all part of this project, this journey into the unknown. I’m still fiddl

A reflective weekend. In pursuit of Slowness. 24 hours away from all online activity, allowing focussed concentrated reading and note making on real paper in real books. In this way, the sketchbook journal resumes its status as a focus for all ideas development in my life. This is how it should be. The book I can’t leave home without. The reflection of me and who I am. And it’s freezing cold everywhere today and I can’t get warm even close up to the fire. So I use some nasty

Sculpting and exploring puppetry is pretty forgiving in terms of outcome. Almost anything looks quirky/interesting/funny. But the outcome even on first attempts represents hours of practice observing people, faces, bodies, movement. And hands and feet. Hands and feet are my bugbear. I have shockingly bad eyesight, so in all the years of life drawing and figure drawing, I have never been close enough to actually see any detail. So I’m fine with a suggestion, an impression of h

The best type of glorious failure today. I have been playing around with surfaces for making shadow puppets, and had read that Ivory Board (which is neither ivory nor board, being simply a bright white smooth cardstock) of a certain weight would take on a nice translucency once oiled out after painting with watercolour. So all I wanted to do was throw some watercolour onto the surface in preparation for oiling, and since I had a figure in mind, the daubings took on a figurati

Playing around with puppet ideas, it occurs to me that it is very enjoyable to scribble without worrying about result. I read an article this morning by Tim Harford who has a book out called Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. He talks of no easy universal solutions to life’s problems; instead “ we must adapt—improvise rather than plan, work from the bottom up rather than the top down, and take baby steps rather than great leaps forward”. Music to my ears. In my ot

First day back in the studio today. A ton of work to do, loads of new collaborative projects to occupy me, but all I could think about when I arrived was the odd position assumed by the little mannequin figure on my desk. What on earth was the point of this figure, I wondered? Bought years ago, I couldn’t recall using it ever. I drew it in various poses, and then googled artists’ mannequins, and found it’s called a lay figure and was used for drapery set-ups in the days befor

Notice I’ve ensured over the last few days that the sketchbook itself is visible. I realise it’s important in the great scheme of things to reinforce the exploration/play element of these “works”. They are not resolved images in any way. Today I used torn off sheets of the FT weekend edition as background paper to draw city types and an Eritrean refugee. All based on found images in the paper itself. I like the pinkness of the FT. #collage #drawing #Postaday2012

Playing around, there’s nothing more fun than just seeing something upside down or back to front and a whole new image appearing. Still on the printmaking follow-up messing, I was amused to peel apart a few sheets which had stuck together (a sort of reverse collage, I suppose) and then see a magical landscape appear with a solitary sailboat crossing a lake. It reminds me of the lake district. #collage #Postaday2012

It’s slowly crystallising what this #dailyfail challenge is all about. Maybe it’ll carry on crystallising till 31st December. And beyond. Such are the ways of creative reflections. I’m realising one very important fact: this is about running completely counter to #adailyselfreflection which was a means of publishing digital work with no other (initial) existence save that of cyberspace. #dailyfail, on the other hand, is exclusively about real paper, real ink, real paint. Ther