au revoir blogger hello tumblr...

testing... testing ... can you still hear me blogger...over ? It feels like far too long since I posted anything on my blogger blog. I've come to the conclusion it's daft to run both a regular blogger and a tumblr for my illustrated ramblings so, sad though it is as I've been on blogger since 2007, I'm going to mothball this blogger site and focus my blogging attentions over onto my tumblr and my new look website at www.mattdawsonillustration.com. My old website url www.matt-dawson.co.uk will also link to my new website, just to make it all the easier to find me. Now it's not the end. I'll still check in on the old blogger and, who knows, maybe I'll pull off the dustsheets and take it for a spin from time to time. For now though please frequent mattdawsonblog.tumblr.com if you'd like to keep up to date with my latest work. Speaking of latest work, the dodo is a clue... why not pop on over to tumblr and have a gander (wait, that's geese not dodos isn't it...)!

a smattering of sketches...

Still working on, for now, 'keep it under the hat' stuff. Here's some sketches that hint at aspects of the project. All very good fun, I look forward to showing more...

Rug designs

I really do like the wonderful graphic approach the illustrator Chris Haughton has to his work, especially in his childrens book A Bit Lost , so when I heard that he has a show coming up at the So Far The Future gallery in London from 2nd to 7th December I pencilled it straight into the diary. Then I found out there was also a design a rug competition running as part of the show, so I just had to have a crack at it. Just got in before tomorrows deadline! The winner, as voted by punters at the show, gets their rug design made by fairtrade craft-makers in Nepal! A worthy industry to champion.

The submission requirements were for a 6 colour max rug design at 560x480 pixels and 72dpi, so these have to be some of the lowest resolution illustrations I've ever done. Curiously it was quite therapeutic and liberating, drawing pixel by pixel with the pen tool in photoshop. A great degree of the design choices are out of your control so I did find myself working in a freer way. A really enjoyable process.

Past viewers of my blog might recognise the Dodo design from a few months back as a screen print (my dodo is far from extinct and keeps popping up all over the place. The design was quite time consuming to convert to low res hard edged pixels though...) and the fish have appeared in a slightly different guise too, swimming with a polar bear. That design came together pretty fast once I had the notion that there's 'always a bigger fish'... The autumn leaves are a newbie for this competition. A bit busy as a design maybe but I just wanted a stab at an illustration that was decorative without a strong narrative, made sense being on the floor and also being viewed from any direction.

So if you have the weekend free why not check out Chris' show. Great digital artwork translated into great handcrafted products and a very worthy endeavour, promoting fair trade and the talented crafts people of Nepal.

Dodo screen print revisited

At the risk of repeating myself I'm taking a look at my dodo screen print design ready for another screen print class I'm taking in a couple of weeks time. For this session I've decided to keep things simpler if at all possible so I've limited the number of screens to two and I've also trapped my colours in critical areas of the illustration (face, feet...) so any misregistration should hopefully be less damaging to the final outcome. In fact I've purposefully misregistered elements in the feathers because I kinda like the colour effect it gives. I've spent long enough on it for one day though... time to unplug at look at it afresh tomorrow.

Dodo by night...

Truth be told I've probably been putting off posting images of my Dodo screen print from last weeks introductory workshop. I screwed up on my colour mixing for the background grey and the foreground greens (why did I end up going so dark for the grey and too light on the green... I'm still not sure...call it a moment of chroma madness...) and my registration of the screens was always a little off, no matter how I wrestled with it. Sill, in line with the positive attitude I'm determined to keep from here on in the day was all about learning and I really did get a great overview on things. I just love the screen printing process and hope to do more as soon as possible. I also cannot recommend enough the excellent folks at Snap studio in Bristol. If you get the chance to, you must stop by and buy. The print work they sell is absolutely fantastic! Many thanks in particular go to the hardworking and inspirational screenprinting wonder that is Emma Peacock who showed us all the ropes on the workshop.

Disassembled Dodo...

"Disassembled Dodo"...now there's a great name for a band...?! Thanks so much to all those who gave positive feedback on my last Dodo post. I feel happy to continue with the little chap...wait, that should be chapess as she has just laid an egg! So the dodo is the one I'll try for print on. I did the colour separations for it yesterday, including a minor change to the bum shape to make it more Dodoesque. The last ass wasn't quite right. It's interesting to see the whole image emerge from just 3 colour layers set to multiply in photoshop. Yes, I know It'd be easier to do the whole thing as vectors in illustrator but I just cannot be as loose and spontaneous creating stuff by dragging vector nodes as I can wacomming pixels. Big positives and negatives with both ways of doing things... So I hope to have a genuine, bona fide A3 screen print to post next week... fingers crossed. Should be fun.

On an unrelated note I watched the animated version of Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing from iTunes last night. If you're a fan of the original book you really won't be disappointed and, if you don't know what I'm on about go have a shufty! The animation captures the disjointed, otherworldly yet familiar antipodean distopia feel from the book perfectly. The character and environment design, colour design, animation, narration (the marvelous Tim Minchin) are all glorious! Go on, treat yourself.

The last Dodo...

Well my screen print thing is next saturday and I cannot help but keep trying out various ideas on what to print. Still with the bird theme for some reason (I do find some birds seemingly preposterous legs set too far back for their centre of gravity stance endlessly amusing...) I'm trying out a Dodo design which has a more decorative, retro, patterned graphic look.

I think the humble Dodo makes an interesting subject as it has a number of themes going on. It's humorous character (thanks in part to Lewis Carroll, Tenniel and also the many and varied engravings, drawings and paintings made from accounts while it was still around), the obvious message of conservation verses extinction of species and also an almost mythic quality. Despite having had existed, I don't know about you but, for me it's almost as if the Dodo is a fictitious creature that has been conjured up to teach us a worthy lesson...

IF - the "late" dodo

Alice arrived just in time to see it take a gold watch from it's waistcoat pocket and exclaim, "Oh dear, oh dear! Oh my beak and feathers, how late I'm getting!" Alice wasn't sure of the correct etiquette when addressing an extinct bird and after thinking back to her lessons she decided upon, "Good Morning Mr. Dodo, and how do you do?" The dodo gave a quick jump and dropped it's umbrella. "It's not polite to startle people like that you know," it said, wagging a feather and frowning at Alice. "And heavens, you've made me drop my best umbrella. How wet I would be getting if it was raining. Alice looked up into the blue, cloudless sky but decided not to remark on this. "And while you are about it," said the Dodo, "how do you do is most certainly not how you should greet a Dodo in polite society. You must say how do you do DO if you don't want to cause confusion." "I'm sorry," said Alice, who was beginning to think the bird to be a little fussy and more than a little stupid. She secretly thought to herself, if all the dodos were like this one I'm not surprised that they are all extinct. She decided to try and change the subject. "Aren't I suppose to meet you for a Caucus-race in chapter 3 of the book...? And I could have sworn that last time I read this story there was a white rabbit hereabouts." "Curiouser and curiouser," remarked the Dodo.

Once again it's been too long by far between IF posts and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to reference two of my favourite illustrators (John Tenniel and Mary Blair) and one of my favourite reads! Tenniel illustrated the original Alice books with those amazing line drawings that managed to be both accurate and controlled and at the same time expressive and full of humour. If I had his draftsmanship I'd be a happy man! Mary Blair was the polar opposite. She was responsible for concept designs for Disneys 1951 animated feature of Alice in Wonderland, and much of the final look of that film is down to her remarkable use of colour and composition. Although the screenplay adaptation of Lewis Carroll's perfect book left a lot to be desired the film did the seemingly impossible and succeeded (in my humble opinion) in working with the 'source material' of Tenniel's illustrations rather than totally obliterating what went before. If I had Mary's instinct for colour I'd be a happy man twice over!