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Alvin Art Tray

4/18/2014

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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)


PictureThe 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.

PictureThe trusty custom made lightbox..a combination of flood light, window frame

and 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.




PictureBack then: With the amount of pens and pencils that were collected up

over 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.

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Heavy Pencil Leads and Etc!

4/9/2014

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PictureA box of 10 "sachets" of 10 non-repro blue

mechanical pencil leads
So the Color Eno pilot pencil leads finally arrived after their long journey from California, along with a customs charge slapped on them by "Border Force"....i mean come on, who chooses these names really? As i joked earlier, it sounds like some government superhero group who has the mutant ability to extort money from mild mannered cartoonists, i mean a package that weighs less than an apple has an 8 pounds sterling "handling fee" with 8 pounds in vat? A HANDLING FEE worth 8 pounds to lift some lightweight package! That's even more expensive than the postage and it flew all the way from the other end of the United States.


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As i mentioned a few blogs previous, i was looking for the non-repro blue pencil leads at a more reasonable price considering how easily i seem to go through them and how expensive they can be (about 4 pounds each pack of 10 leads). Here they were however from San Jose California's jetpens.com at about 2 pounds per pack. Just what i needed i thought. I believe the postage was about 10 dollars and seemed reasonable. Little did i know that anything above the value of 50 dollars and the greedy assholes at "Border Force" want to slap a charge on there "just because", thus attempting to foil my plans at trying to save a few coins in my artistic endeavors. (hey what's wrong with trying to save a few pennies)



Picture with a handling fee of eight pounds sterling,

It would appear that handling these

pencil leads is backbreaking work
So what is the moral of the story? It can't be "support your own" considering that everywhere you look in the likes of Asda they have nothing but chicken from Holland, Brazillian or Argentinian corned beef, Polish sliced meat, Indian Surimi and so on and so on. So what is it? pick on the little guy who's just wanting to draw a bunch of cartoons? I mean a handling fee to handle a punch of pencil leads? backbreaking work i must say, i wish i could get paid as handsomely for lifting a pencil and sticking it on a plane....and VAT? I wonder what firework my hard earned cash helps contribute to when it goes up in smoke at the end of the year to the sound of Auld Lang Syne.

So if you're wondering why the word "starving artist" still prevails you can be rest assured that the government is partially responsible...but aren't they always? They want to take the color out of everything, even my Color Enos for heaven's sake!

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The entire content of the package.
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Back of the box
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Illustrating Asian Characters

4/4/2014

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PictureArtwork by Jim Lee, an artist originally from Seoul
Over the past couple of days I’ve been looking through many of the old comic books I used to have stored away in the attic from my teens and it’s stirred a lot of memories. For the past few months now Christine and I have been working on the Cultural Revolution Tarot and it is the first time I’ve ever drawn Asian characters extensively.

As a young man I was inspired by artists like Andy Kubert and Marc Silvestri in the 90’s and as I looked through the illustrations, particularly of the Asian characters, I remember a time when I would examine the various way these comic book artists handled Asian features, particularly the eyes. These artists were illustrating x-men related characters but i remember when i would attempt to draw Asian features, i could never truly get it to look convincing. In fact, even to this day i am still completely unsure what exactly it is in terms of an actual "process" to create believable Asian features in characters, though Christine tells me i tend to do a good job.

PictureAndy Kubert's work from the 90's on an asian character
We've been working on the Sun and Ace of Cups the past wee while in between projects for Portstewart and Bushmills. I think over the past few projects i've really learned a lot in terms of using layers because when you work on artworks with any number of people, you always want to accommodate their vision. When it comes to designing tarot cards or maps or signage, often you'll be called to shift things around, reduce items in size or blow them up bigger than what they originally are, colour particular layers, such as the background we've been doing for the Ace of Cups especially.

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Getting back to the old illustrations of Asian characters, i've always been inspired by Chris Bachalo's illustrations but i feel that when it comes to Asians, they aren't necessarily too Asian looking at times, though that could be a combination of style and also that the characters themselves are sometimes a mix of two nationalities. Frank Miller's extensive work on Japanese characters in the 80's have a very differnt look from that of other artists like Silvestri and Kubert

PictureOur characters in the Cultural Revolution Tarot depict not only the Asian look, but whimsical ideas like pandas and koi fish and astronaut dogs. Children feature in our images extensively, bringing a bright cheery optimistic look to our cards.

All in all it has been quite rewarding artistically to work on illustrating Asian characters as it's something i have never really attempted before at length.

James
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