York Model Railway Museum and the 1:72 Scale Axis of Evil

Having suffered the indignity of being dumped - usurped, you might say - from my long reign at the top, the peak, the summit, the acme, the pinnacle of my Fantasy Football League by the multiple goal scoring feats of bearded Scouse homunculus Wayne Rooney, I was looking for some solace in Dara O'Briain's thoughts on him. ("That's not the face of a major footballing star, that's a minor hurler from Offaly who got lucky. Look at the way the sunlight dances off his ears. Hear the wind whistle through his teeth - it says whhhhayne..." and so on.)

Couldn't find it, though, so I shall content myself with the reason I went past this notable English tourist attraction on the train last year and, travelling alone, burst out laughing in public merely at seeing the sign.

The Long Damp Knight of the Soul

I had hoped to be cracking on with my first ever comic strip job by now (no money, but "sixteen pages of mutant cat action") but we still haven't moved yet. We're waiting on a damp and timber fellow today, so it's probably the first comic strip to be vitally connected with damp proofing since Batman vs Swamp Thing: Convey My Regrets, with its wonderful sequence - unforgettably illustrated by Frank Miller - where the Dark Knight, pursuing a claim over unnecessary treatment for wood beetle infestation, enters the twilight world of Gotham's small claims courts.

Richard's Status:

The house buying process is making him want to enter unnamed law practitioners' place of work and lay about him with a woollen sock full of manure.

Give Way To Liquid Lino

So, my first ever linocut (not illustrated), apart from the one I did at middle school where I dug holes right though the lino, was a quick sketch of a fishing boat at sea. I made it up out of my head and it didn't take very long, and I did the pressing part with a spoon, but the point was just to see how it turned out. It wasn't great. But it did push the door open a little and the whole process of inking up and peeling off a print, amateurish as it was, was very exciting. I shall return. But the main effect was to make me look again at some linocut artists that I like and marvel anew at their ability to combine technical skill with an artistic sensibility. I struggled with one layer of black ink; Bernard Green, splendid Welsh artist, worked up to twelve layers and the results were tremendously subtle and complex:

Bernard Green, Evening Ffynonfaethog

I temporarily forgot Bernard Green's name and while I was desperately Googling "Welsh" and "linocut" I had a happy accident and discovered Ian Phillips who includes something very Japanese in his landscapes of Wales. His works shows the great vibrancy of colour, strength of form and surprising flexibility that linocut can have in the right hands.

I find these inspiring and daunting in about equal measures.

The Joy of Sets

Quite apart from being wonderful in its own right, this neatly explains the pleasure to be had in making marks upon a piece of clean paper.

To quote the British Printing Society, "There are some people, who for all normal purposes seem rational, become weak at the knees at the thought of applying inked letters or images on to paper."

And the machines - oh, man, the machines are lovely.

There's Nothing Like a Good Scratch

I have a distinct memory from school of trying scraperboard for the first time, and I liked then all the same things that I like now. There's the satisfyingly black blackness of the ink, the lovely contrast of the white as it's revealed, and the approach you need in your mind, nicely inverted from drawing, as you add the light areas light rather than shadow. The variety of effect is interesting, too - from big, chunky 'woodcut' finishes to very fine 'engraving.'

It has its limitations, obviously; if you're a bit energetic with the cut you can go through ink and plaster alike and end up cutting cardboard, and the white areas can be a bit mottled as the China clay underneath is yellowish - this is probably why scraperboard is more suited to images to be reproduced electronically as these imperfections can be removed. But the advantages I think more than make up for it; it's cheaper than engraving or woodcuts (if you get it wrong you don't maff up a tenner's worth of boxwood), and you've got that same variety of style available to you.

I started off using the standard tools, and the ivied oak tree was done using these. Perhaps inevitably my disturbingly anal interest in detail began to creep in, and I wasn't happy with the fineness of the line I could get with the ordinary tools, so I made my own. I used an ordinary pin and Araldited it into the end of an old ballpoint pen; it had a nicely cushioned grip and I can't begin to describe the pleasure of making the infinitessimally fine line in the black ink. Magic. I used this to do these two portraits.



It has disadvantages. The pins lose their sharpness quite quickly, and I had to use emery paper to restore the point. This means that the pin wears down surprisingly quickly, and if you've Araldited a pin into a pen you can't get it out, so don't use a pen you're particularly fond of. I tried hardening the next one by heating the pin in the gas hob, and this seemed to keep the point a bit longer, but also became brittle and snapped while I was sharpening it. Now I'm using the body of a disposable propelling pencil, seeing as they seem to be throwaway tools. I'd like to discover a method of replacing the pin without chucking away the pen. As soon as I know, so shall you, dear reader.

I did discover, though, that if you cock it up a little an area can be slightly rescued by re-inking with a drawing pen that uses an indian-type ink. If you leave it to dry, the ink can be delicately re-scratched, providing you didn't go through the China clay layer to begin with. I can't tell you how badly wrong I got the eyes on Wee Hughie there, but I managed to drag them back to something like respectability by these means.

Fold, Stick or Twist

In today's business marketplace, good design is most obviously evident in the paradigm of the practical, where an easily facilitated consumer interface enacts the brand ethos.


Fig. 1:



Update: apparently this video is being much enjoyed, via a blog which embedded it from Colin's Flickr page, by the Brompton community of Japan.