I recently acquired an Alvin side table tray for my art board and got it all put into place.
Talk about a difficult task getting an American company to ship it to anywhere outside of the United States. Finally i found a place in Chicago who had either the means or the foresight to think further afield.
There were of course a few places in the UK willing to sell it, which although would have been more convenient, would have cost well over 60 pounds plus about 20 pounds postage (if memory serves me). I think this one cost me under 25 pounds including postage (42 dollars) despite coming all the way from the U.S.(artsupply.com)
Talk about a difficult task getting an American company to ship it to anywhere outside of the United States. Finally i found a place in Chicago who had either the means or the foresight to think further afield.
There were of course a few places in the UK willing to sell it, which although would have been more convenient, would have cost well over 60 pounds plus about 20 pounds postage (if memory serves me). I think this one cost me under 25 pounds including postage (42 dollars) despite coming all the way from the U.S.(artsupply.com)
The table as it originally was...minus the side clips which i put on there myself
The table itself was initially found by my eldest brother in a place called Refurnish in Coleraine. I believe it's an old architects table and i had kept whatever bits and pieces that came attached to it intact on the table up until recently. For years I'd always wanted one of these tables because, as anyone who draws perspective knows, more often than not you need a pretty big work surface to rule lines that run off the page and whatever else. As a young teen whenever i would come across a new art store in any town and city i would visit in Northern Ireland, I'd ask the same old question. I'd ask them if they sold artists tables, architects tables, comic book artist tables....none of which would ever ring a bell. They'd always look at me like i had two heads. Maybe things have changed nowadays. More often than not they'd shake their heads and say sorry....but if they were really trying, they'd bring me over to a A4 kid's lightbox and say "is that what you mean"....hmmm, not quite. Perhaps i had been asking the wrong questions, it's hard to say.
The trusty custom made lightbox..a combination of flood light, window frameand chipboard...better than most of the stuff you can buy in my opinion..
thanks pops
For the past few years i'd taken to drawing more and more on the actual custom lightbox glass surface me and my dad had made a few years ago because most of the time my work involved editing and re-editing original images i had created and so tracing over existing images to recreate or alter them involved being at the lightbox more than the actual art table. It's only in recent times while drawing the likes of Sheila's Finn McCool sign, or the Cultural Revolution Tarot that i am getting around to drawing whole new imagery without too much need of the lightbox.
Back then: With the amount of pens and pencils that were collected upover the years the side table tray has come in handy for leaving less
overall clutter
The Bushmills Map and Brochure for example involved both drawing the map on the wall, as can be see in my videos, and the heritage images were basically all drawn with the use of the lightbox and reference photos.
It would be great if one day art became more of a big thing in Northern Ireland, enough to actually have a decent art store you could walk into which didn't always cater for watercolorists or painters in general.
It would be great if one day art became more of a big thing in Northern Ireland, enough to actually have a decent art store you could walk into which didn't always cater for watercolorists or painters in general.
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