Thursday 31 May 2007

covers- BACCHUS no.30

With this one at least I had a confident idea from the start. Collage waving 'Yoo-hoo' at the reader. She hadn't been on a cover for quite a while. In fact she hadn't been in the storyline either since Bacchus was locked up in jail. The problems started when I painted it in gouache. Well, actually if I'd just stuck with the gouache we might have been okay, but I coloured her coat with a fluorescent orange pantone marker. I'm sure Evans would have called me an idiot, and remembering how well that Eyeball Kid cover came out, I'd have just said 'photograph it and see what happens', in my naivete not realizing that whenever these mad ideas worked out well it was because some poor muggins, unbeknownst to me, had put a lot of thought and effort into how it might be reproduced. So Mick grumbled, had a few beers with me, grumbled less, took it away to where he was working the nightshift in a design studio, and dropped the negs in at my place the following morning on his way home (he described our working method in brief a few days ago in comments). We'd usually be pressing ahead with the days rigors when he arrived. I had two drawing tables in the front room for me and Pete, as well as big desk with the typewriter on it, which was Anne's station. In fact, it wasn't really a 'front room', more the passage between the veranda and the living room. The front door remained open all day, letting in the subtropical sunshine and occasional bodies trying to sell me a story idea.
The problem this time was that the orange insisted on reproducing as a bright yellow as evidenced by the chemical proof Mick was showing to me. I can't recall whether we had another attempt to photograph it, but my solution to the problem in the end was to retouch the chemical proof and use that as the actual cover art. The retouching involved quite a bit of additional colour on the face. The surface of this was tacky, and we may have kicked it around before I decided it was to be the precious finished surface. There's a little speck of dirt stuck to the character's nose, and when I tried to remove it I just made it worse.
The true solution never occurred to me at the time. I had successfully made xeroxes of the painting at full and half size, which is why I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't reproduce for the process camera. There would be times like that I dearly wished I had been accepted for the graphic design diploma course way back in '74 (to this day I can't figure out why I couldn't get in there... must have been my arrogance or something) since I've spent so many days wrestling with technical problems associated with printing. Anyway, the local university paper made a special issue devoted to comics and Minty Moore became a key guy in rounding up material for them. I gave them the large size xerox of this cover as a stand alone piece of art (there's a great deal going on in the graffiti behind the figure), and it printed perfectly, at a nice big tabloid size too. In other words the xerox process converts everything in the art to the same material, photopcopy toner, so that all the elements react in the same way under the process camera. It's when you mix media on the same surface that you run into problems. Lesson learned.
(1) is the solicitation image as it appeared in the Previews catalogue, (2) is my half-size xerox and is colour-true (There may be a moire pattern caused by the scanning for showing it here.) (3) is the print job.
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I awoke today to find that I have that new Blogger feature I’ve been hearing about, the one that deletes your post while you’re working on it, and it doesn’t matter that you saved it earlier. It’s gone, pal. Thus the following has been done more than once, so let’s just hope it makes sense.
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Women in Art a short video. This is very lovely. Thanks for the link to my fellow artist, Christopher Moonlight. Christopher also says he just picked up The Black Diamond Detective Agency at Barnes and Noble, so it is in the shops now..
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Belgians do what PM can't: banish Tintin -The Australian-Sally Jackson- May 31
Bill Leak, The Australian's artist and daily editorial cartoonist, has been threatened with legal action unless he stops depicting federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd as Tintin…
This follows the news that three Tintin movies are in the pipeline, with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson confirming they would direct two of them. Leak said he had been drawing Rudd as Tintin at least since December. Tintin's dog, Snowy, also features in the cartoons, although not his best friend, the hard-drinking Captain Haddock. "Sadly, Julia Gillard doesn't have a great big black beard," Leak said yesterday.

(link thanks to Michael Evans)
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Nobel laureate's next project will marry words and pictures.- May 30-Guardian
The Nobel laureate, whose previous acclaimed works include My Name is Red and Snow, had wanted to become a painter before he began writing novels... As part of the early groundwork for the book, he is preparing to teach a course at Columbia University in New York this autumn which has the working title of "pictures and texts".
"It's sort of a random survey of the relationship between pictures and texts," he explained, "from Plato's cave to Heidegger's Van Gogh shoes." The course will examine pictures as illustrations of texts and texts as descriptions of pictures, and explore the intermingling of picture and text in human thought...


Followers of this blog will recall that I have a special interest in the evolving concept of the novel in our times.
(link thanks to Ben Smith)
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German mistakes subway for underground car park
May 30, -BERLIN (Reuters) –
her vehicle got stuck on the stairs, police said on Wednesday.

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2 Comments:

Blogger spacedlaw said...

Actually, Pamuk is describing extensively his passion for painting in "Istanbul", so I thought it would only be a matter of time before he'd go that way.
N.

31 May 2007 at 00:44:00 GMT-5  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

And in 'My Name is Red' Pamuk is great at describing the artwork of the illustrators and the way outside influences are brought to bear on their styles.

This next story caught my eye after re-reading 'Doing the Islands with Bacchus' the other night.

'Taxi to Greece to avoid airports'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/suffolk/6706401.stm

Ben Smith

31 May 2007 at 03:28:00 GMT-5  

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