New Asemic Script #3

Quite a while has passed since I recorded my progress. This has been ongoing for some time now – I am not posting as regularly as I should. Having established a number of forms in a favourable calligraphic line, I chose to explore other line qualities in order to see if the forms ‘held up’ to treatments they weren’t designed to handle, and to see if anything interesting happened. Although I apply a more thorough methodology to my work, I am not afraid of opening other doors to see what’s behind.

I decided to create my own lines rather than use the software presets – remember I’m using Adobe Illustrator here – my lines are in red above their applications. So I opened some doors and was largely appreciative of how most forms retained their basic dynamic, but was not overly excited by the results. Always worth a look though.

Now it’s time for a small digression. I would like to admit here that I have not always been an advocate of the ‘see what happens’ school of design as many of my old students will attest. Having been trained as a designer before the Apple revolution, I was schooled in the ‘thinking things through, sketching things out, mocking things up’ methodology, which was ultimately aimed at properly refining the idea – not the imagery, but was inevitably used as an economical measure – to avoid expensive mistakes and changes late in the process. Computers have pretty much done away with this. I can’t begin to tell you how disheartened I have been by seeing students trying out every font in alphabetical order, rather than making an informed or even intuitive decision. (Deep breath…)

As I have matured I have finally acknowledged the convenience that the ‘modern’ (good grief, I feel old at 45!) digital design process and can really appreciate what just happened just now. It was not that long ago that the production of this stage would have been so time consuming and costly that you would have been publicly humiliated for even suggesting it in a studio environment.

Now, before anyone gets the chance to butt in (the joys of blogging!) I wish to make it very clear that this type of process is no substitute for thinking, deciding and committing to a process, going on to refine and develop to the end. Having already formulated my approach, tried and tested my choices and decisions, I can now appreciate the convenience the software allows.

NOTE TO STUDENTS: Never let the dog take you out for a walk…

Phew! Glad I got that off my chest. I hope you managed to get some popcorn and a comfort break before the main feature resumed.

Back to the calligraphic line. Having created a handful of glyphs I began to compose lines, adding new forms and ligatures in response to the new structures emerging. At this point I noticed a number of Arabic inspired forms emerging which pleased me greatly. I was particularly interested in the possibilities of cross-line ligatures:

Well, there’s only one way to deal with an itch and that is to scratch; some careful maneuvering allowed several other lines drop or reach up:

This was a crucial stage. I had grown a little ‘glyph-blind’ and really couldn’t judge whether this had worked as I had hoped it would, so I decided to take it elsewhere and look at it a different way, by digitally applying it to an old manuscript page, adding borders and some inter-line noodling:

The verdict? Well, like the curate’s egg; good it parts. I think the main body of the script works – there is still some refinement to go – but the vertical ligatures are awkward, ugly even. But the inter-line noodling was also interesting…

I was regularly getting samples off-screen to check scale and composition, and couldn’t resist printing a sample off onto handmade paper:

On revisiting the glyphs to remove the undesirable ligatures, I began to look at the details – in particular where lines meet or converge. This was also an opportunity to tidy things up a little by converting the lines to paths and manually making adjustments to make more visually pleasing union points:

So it was back a few steps, lose the ligatures, and close up the lines. This, I think is much more elegant:

After this time consuming and ‘oh-so pernickety’ stage, it was time to see a block of text:

Remember that noodling in between the lines earlier? That was created just to add something that would suggest a small sub-script, or even something similar to Jewish micrography. It was created from a number of smaller strokes, some taken directly from the main script, and others drawn using a graphics tablet. I decided to have a look at that in isolation from the main script and was generally quite pleased. I thought it looked a little less formal, so grouped lines together to suggest verses.

Asemic poetry? Poetry translated into asemic script? Or a just a streamlined shorthand? I think this has further mileage – a linear script is almost entirely dependent upon the subtlety of its curves, dips and peaks…

New Asemic Script #2

Following my initial ideas and developments of a new asemic script, I made a symbol from parts of the lines I had established previously:

I had a notion that this looked a little ‘uncial’ but was quite encouraged by this – it would be interesting to see if this falls into line or whether I can corrupt and push it further.

Uncial scripts are are early Latin and Greek styles from the 3rd to 8th centuries and can be identified by their rounded structures and flowing strokes:

I put together a set of pieces culled from those initial figures:

With these I began to look for natural alignments and flow:

I composed a few more ‘characters’ and introduced a horizontal stroke. I say horizontal very loosely.

And went back to the first test character, making a number of variations on the theme:

After putting these characters together in different orders, I came across an awkward meeting that didn’t look calligraphic:

And created a more natural union that suggests a tight loop that might naturally occur in the flow of writing. This presented a new set of possibilities; characters with different terminals dependent upon, say their position in a word or line, as well as proximity to other specific characters. Hmm.

At this point I went into overdrive, trying lots of component parts and considering joins, combinations and ligatures. This is what my working file looked like:

and what I have produced so far is looking encouraging. The top shows the fine monoline, the middle a 10pt monoline and at the bottom the custom 20pt calligraphic stroke.

Ok. I have some basic structures. It’s really time to see what happens and where these may lead…

New Asemic Script #1

I have been sketching out ideas for the next installment of my book series for some time now and have come to a few good points on which to start. The first is the development of an entirely new asemic script that will hopefully guide the direction for the whole piece.

Let me share my thinking and some of my process  with you. I have created several asemic writing systems before, each from very different starting points; the first was an automatic, handwritten script, developed over years of filling up pages in dull meetings:

This led to the development a set of  formalised glyphs, based upon a jaunty 45° angle directly lifted from the hand written script:

These two variants were the initial inspiration for the first book  ‘Four Fools’ and were used throughout:

As I was putting the finishing touches to Four Fools I decided to continue to develop the theme and aim for a series of four books. Not long after the first book was published and began to sell, I began to think about how the next book might work and I decoded to introduce some different writing systems, glyphs and symbols. Rather than begin on paper I set out exploring early ideas on screen. This one was inspired by old punched tickets:

Encouraged by this, I began exploring some more geometric, grid based linear forms that seemed to suggest a numbering or accounting system:

Whilst exploring the geometric grid ideas, I introduced a line weight difference favouring the horizontal strokes which led to this:

The gridded forms had worked well, but were visually repetitive, so I elected to take a less rigid approach. I still retained the geometric shapes, but began to formulate a ‘kit of parts’ approach that yielded something a little more natural that what I had produced previously:

I was pleased with this but also felt that it had some more to give. It was some time after whilst working on another project that I hit on the idea of converting this ultra geometric style to something that appeared to have some history. After failing to apply any convincing roman serifs, I tried the ‘old typewriter’ treatment, using some hi-res samples from a 1920 document and a huge amount of cut’n'paste, as well as too many hours of PhotoShop editing:

All of these were used in the second book ‘Pabulum’ along with the first two and a fair bit of brushwork.  This was even used the cover!

The next one was inspired by more Arabic structures and was originally a lot more complex than this – which was illegible at the sizes needed for book print, so this is a a highly simplified version that I think I will continue to develop at some point:

The more observant amongst you may have spotted that this also occasionally appears in the blog header…

Whilst I am very pleased with Pabulum, I feel that the next one needs to be simpler, with fewer scripts, and explore some more formal compositions and approaches. I also want to focus on the flow and texture of a script rather than add more grid based glyphs.

This brings us up to date. I have decided to develop another script – to me meaning something derived from the hand written – so I started filling sketchbooks again but found myself struggling to move away from the style I used originally. In order to find new inspiration, I tried using different media. Whilst this gave me some interesting and ultimately useful results, I was still no further in establishing a starting point.

Over the Christmas period I had downloaded a number of iPad drawing apps, some free form and some grid-based and a rather basic calligraphic one called Sketji by Aerfish. This is a simple tool – imagine a large Chinese calligraphy brush loaded with black ink:

Well this works just like that. A fast movement creates a thick stroke and slowly create a thin one. Refreshingly, this is all it does; no unnecessary bells and whistles, in-app upgrades or special effects. It does allow you to save your images though and gives you the option of high or low resolution too! I absolutely love it! It is an excellent tool for my purposes and I have wasted no time putting it to good use:

These were placed into Adobe Illustrator and converted to paths using the livetrace tool:

I started by using these as templates to see what the raw lines would look like, and ended up just focusing on a line and ellipse. The grid was created at a slight angle – just 5° from vertical to prevent me from exaggerating further as I wanted something much more subtle than my original 45° script. I kept the ellipse at the angle I drew it:

Though I was happy with the angle I was concerned that the ellipse was too condensed and would be problematic at small sizes. With that in mind I placed a smaller ellipse inside aligned to one side to really force the issue. The positioning was arbitrary here – I just wanted to look at the proportions and be able to visually gauge when I thought that a balance had been achieved:

After a fair bit of nudging and tweaking, I thought that the bottom middle was looking somewhere comfortable for development. The next stage was to make a proto-glyph; something to push around further and try a few diversions…

These simple structures will allow me to consider a range of structural and compositional factors. They may or may not be recognisable by the end, but right now they are like single celled organisms emerging from the primordial soup with only the faint whiff of evolution in the air.

My first port of call is the quality of line, as previous experience has taught me that this can have a profound influence on everything that follows (the first script was originally developed as a monoline and worked well until the moment I changed the line weight and style – pretty much every glyph was manually then adjusted by hand!) The standard calligraphy brushes in Illustrator are useful to start with to check out variations in width and angle of stroke:

But is is when the options palette is employed that the style can be adjusted exactly to where you want it. These settings give me a semibold stroke, decent visual definition in the stresses, as well as a friendly, brush-line roundness to the terminal of the stroke:

Then I did a scaling test along with a narrower 10pt stroke. This showed some areas that will need attention, especially at the points of convergence where the curves meet the upright strokes, but I am getting a good feeling about this:

I’ll keep you posted…

Why?

On super thick handmade paper. About A4-ish. Just for fun. One for me, a few for friends. Oh, and if you were wondering, it does…

I HAVE GOT TWO

TO GIVE AWAY!

If you would like one, you’re going to have to make me smile! Drop me a comment (by clicking that little box next to the date under the title of this post) and tell me something amusing about yourself. In seven days I will choose my favourites and contact you directly for mailing details. Winners will be announced as an addition to this post and on Twitter! Spread the word…

UPDATE!

Many thanks to all of you who commented here – it’s nice to know that I am not the only one with odd habits! As I said in the post, I only have two of these to give away and feel bad about disappointing people, so I will be sending something printy to everyone! Everyone has been emailed – just let me know when you get your pack!

Thankyou to everyone who joined in, especially Phoebe and Justin who will receive one of these prints (and a few other bits)  in their mail soon!

Postcards #2

I have a very inviting pile of nicely printed postcards that are demanding to be overprinted. Again, I am experimenting with some new colours (for me) and aiming for a grungy/retro feel on each of the cards. I had printed a number of additional cards to use as set-ups as there is nothing definite when it comes to printing, and every stage has an opportunity for something to go awry.

Take this first print. this slimy effect is the result of a combination of things: a lot of transparent extender, too much ink mixed and rolled out on my inkslab and subsequently too much on the roller. The block is then over-inked which squishes out the excess under pressure and leaves this ‘beading’ effect. I also find that it takes two or three prints for the block to ‘come up to’ readiness – where the repetition of  re-inking saturates the lino surface and rids it of any greasy residue, either from the carving (a very hands-on process) or more likely in this case, of any soap left over from cleaning (I use a little liquid soap and water for Caligo water based relief inks, and baby wipes to keep my fingers clean during printing.)

But after a few prints, the block settles down and I start to get the results I’m after. This is quite a rich orange, but because of the transparent extender, it looks metallic, almost gold on the block!

This image has been my wallpaper ever since!

This was about 98% extender and 2% black! I couldn’t get the transparency I wanted so I under inked the block instead.

And then it was on to some shitty brown over the baby blue…

If anyone else would like to enjoy some printy wallpaper, you can down load it here.

Print Postcards #1

The unseasonally warm start to spring (although it has been followed by some fairly sharp ‘brass monkey’ weather) seems to have got my dander up in the printshop!

I run out a decent number of postcards using my trusty Belmont coppertop block and added a blog link in 10pt Gill Sans Italic. I ended up using the full stops from another font as the Gill was ‘sans punctuation.’ This has resulted in an unsightly drop on the baseline, but I decided to go with it as I thought it did not detract too much. (I can hear the sharp intake of breath from the purists and am girding my loins in anticipation of the responses this may draw!)

 
My aim on this project was to experiment with some new colours, combinations and effects, and began by mixing up some Opaque White with a dab of Prussian Plue and a tiny smidgen of Process Yellow:

I added just a little more yellow to push this towards a pale turquoise.

I am very pleased with this colour – it has covered well and laid down a rich base for the next stage. Oh, I had cut these blocks to try to develop my cutting skills. Sorry, no images of that part.

The next coulour was a soft pink, again using a base of the white with a dab of magenta.

Again, this has covered well and dressed up this blackletter a little…

I did want these prints to be clean – free from the lino ‘peaks’  – but thought these added something to the effect. I kept making small adjustments to the block to keep these to a minimum though.

The next block was printed in a baby peach colour, made from white, yellow and magenta.

This one has printed very clean and sharp as I intended.

There is also a fourth block, but I’ll save something for the end! With 40 cards all printed and stacked in my drying rack, I’ll let you know what is to come next; transparent colours.

Joan of Art

I forgot to upload the image I used for reference in my last post! This is one of the standard press release shots – there are a number of others quite similar in composition to this, but I liked the reactions of the men behind her.

Again, having coloured the lino with red marker, I traced out the lines of the second block and began cutting:

It’s in the small details where the benefit of the red surface really comes in, but you also get a good idea of what you are going to get too.

But, in my haste to get this done for the UK start of season five (just listen to me harping on – as if it matters to anybody when I do this!) I only printed a couple of tests, so I needed to get some proper prints done from the first block.

I decided to break with my usual “best on white” approach and use some bright yellow Colourplan by GFSmith for this one…

A few days later and the test print off the new block in a rich, dark brown shows no apparent issues, so it’s back to the press, and with a little trepidation, onto the second colour…

I was hoping that my jig was going to be enough to register the two colours…

Not bad!

The print measures 175x140mm on a 300x250mm sheet.

Joannie! Hold my calls and fix me a scotch. I’ll be in front of the TV tonight.

Mad Men Returns!

The long wait for season five of Mad Men is almost over! During the last few days, to get me in the mood or just to drive me a bit crazy, I decided to break with my usual themes and create a lino print featuring one of the main reasons why I watch!

Having selected an appropriate image I did a little tracing and because the image was quite complex, I grabbed a red marker and flooded the lino with colour – this would help to show the smaller cuts clearer and give me a good representation of how well I’d cut.

This is to be a two colour print – this time with two separate blocks – this will be too difficult to do as a reduction print!

Almost one hour later and I’m getting a pretty good idea of how this one is going! But it is in the printing that the proof is found. The following day I went to print some tests from a few blocks I am working on…

If I could wolf-whistle on the web, I would do it now! I’d best get started on that second block then!

Awesome! #2

The first colour has been printed. It’s time to move on. This is quite a moment, because there’s no going back – what you have is what you’ve got! I wasn’t sure how I was going to develop this when I began, so this is a kind of ‘as it happens’ post and I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

Once I’d removed a halo of around 5 mm around the words, I decided to clean up the block a little. During the last print run, I kept on picking up ink on the peaks – something I have actively incorporated in other lino prints, but I wanted the letters to remain white and clean on this one.

I used a flat bladed knife and a shallow curved gouge to take off all the peaks in the negative areas to minimise the possibility of picking up ink – I’ll also have to be careful inking up the block.

The central area is now relatively smooth. I decided to ‘loosen up the edges next, to introduce some of the lino texture into the print:

And it’s back to the press for the next colour, which as I mentioned before, is always an exciting affair (for us printerly types) as it usually the first time you get a real visual on the cutting:

The first print for me is always a plain proof print just to check that all is performing as it should, and then it is into production; here is the process for each print:

Inking – I used a small roller for this as I was working on a much reduced surface area – I had to be careful not to put any ink onto the cutaway space – when you have open spaces this is not as easy as it sounds!

EVERY inking left something on the block, so I needed to scrape it off with a blade and carefully remove the spoil…

With the sheet positioned in the jig (just a simple card structure with flaps to hold the print in place and position the block) I carefully put the block into place face down.

Four sheets of felt and a sheet of board go on top for packing (I have done some experiments and this works well for me on this process – I am not a purist!)

And in it goes. The press spins freely with fingertip ease – it is well oiled and only squeaks a little! These little copy presses were exceptionally well made and fit for purpose and I love using this press; it is so basic and relies upon your own feel for pressure…

Once the platen is down onto the block, a quick change of grip and a good pull (grunt!) and…

Awesome!

Well, not quite. Although I did do lots of cleaning up the blank areas after inking, some got through and fouled the white areas…

Some were not fully registered, but not so badly to render them useless – the nature of this design will tolerate a fair bit of ‘slippage’ and that’s printing for you! A lot were spot on though:

And although I did ‘lose’ a few, I am very pleased with the amount of prints available for the next and last step. So where are we now?

Indeed.

Awesome!

At the Leeds Print Festival I had a number of conversations with people about reduction linocut prints, where I heard of other people’s successes and told of my failures. That’s not entirely true, my reduction cuts have worked out very well, but my process certainly left a lot to be desired. I had awful problems with registration which led to a lot of setting up, which led to fewer final prints. One exactly. A lot of work for very little reward.

I thought I would give it another go, and demonstrate the process to my students along the way, as they are soon to be exploring some printmaking techniques. But what should I do? I figured that since pretty much everything is considered ‘awesome’ by anyone under 20 these days and I must have heard it said at least 4,732 times during the course of the day, that I must do something worthy of the word.

I scrawled out the word a good thirty times in marker pen on layout paper and parcel paper (both have a good ‘spread’ with markers) and selected out a couple that I thought worked well – flowing, legible, but a bit grafitti-ish. Awesome.

Scanning, scaling and cleaning up a bit was done in PhotoShop…

The final composition is 160mm square.

The area was marked out on a slab of lino and the image transferred using carbon paper.

Then it was a matter of removing the lettering – this I want to remain white throughout the process.

Just a trim around the edge and we are ready to go. Awesome.

If you are not familiar with reduction cut printing, it is a destructive process, where the same block is recarved for each colour:

Nick Clegg = reduction cut – hahahahahahahahah!

A couple of days later I got down to the first printing and mixed up a rich, custard yellow, and set up a registration jig. I always think that the first inking up is a bit exciting (I don’t get out much) as it is the point that the lino block becomes a printing block.

I printed twenty onto a stiff white card, and am very pleased with the quality, considering the large areas of solid colour.

I expect to lose a few along the way, both as set-ups and mis-registration, but aiming for a decent number of quality results.

Indeed.