Little House, Big City

A few weeks ago, I heard about a project which Manchester Craft Mafia were organising, to create a miniature city, with lots of little buildings contributed by members of the public.  This captured my imagination, as I have always had a thing for little houses.  It's also being created in my home city, so I thought I'd join in and add my own contribution. The project was described as follows:

The 'Crafty City' is a project that is very close to the heart of the Manchester Craft Mafia. We wanted to do something big that would grab people’s attention and get them involved. Taking inspiration from Anthony Gormley’s ‘Field for the British Isles’ and as our mission is to promote craft and creativity throughout Manchester and beyond, we came up with the idea of making a Crafty City, a Mini Manchester, a Not So Big Up North.

The ‘Crafty City’ is a project for everyone. For crafters and non-crafters, for people living in Manchester or further afield in the UK and if possible people from overseas. Creativity is everywhere and in everyone, and we would like to encourage it out by providing the chance to contribute, share and make.

Manchester Craft Mafia are inviting as many people to create a little building using any art material or method. The only restriction being the size and we hope the ‘Crafty City’ will grow and develop. Our city started on Thursday 19th August 2010 during MCM's re-launch night with about thirty seven mini buildings and MCM hope it will grow from a village, into a town and then into a large ‘Crafty City’. We hope this will reflect the history of how Manchester grew from a little camp to what it is today, a large and very busy city. It will pop-up at both of our Summer and Christmas Fairs and we aim to ‘show and tell’ about each and every building on our website. Our final goal is to exhibit the ‘Crafty City’ throughout 2011.

After some thought, I made the decision to tackle my building with papier mache pulp, since this is generally quite light and robust.  It's not something I've used before, though I've always admired projects made with it, and because I thought I might like to make a few projects of my own with it in future, I bought a large bag.  The base of the model was formed by half of a large juice carton, which dictated the gable on the roof.  But I didn't really plan the style of the building at all, it just 'appeared' all by itself it seemed, as a traditional 19th century house.  It's been another labour of love for me, which I now have to get to the organisers of the exhibition, along with another 2 buildings created by my boys.

Apparently submissions can be made up until about Christmas I think.  I'm really looking forward to seeing the exhibition next year, and seeing if I can spot my little house in the big city.

Bikes and Boats

I said I'd share the result of any tweaking I did to the photo I posted a couple of weeks ago for the Gallery.  As I said at the time, I felt that this photograph, which I took very quickly while on our recent holiday in Cornwall, had some potential, so I've spent a bit of time experimenting with it in Photoshop.  It's been somewhat frustrating really, because I have a strong image in my mind of what I'm trying to achieve, but my Photoshop skills are still fairly rudimentary, which means I haven't always been able to achieve completely what I wanted.  Still, I've learned a bit more from it, and I produced 2 alternatives, both of which I like, but in different ways.  The first photo is the original photograph before I did anything with it.

For the following photo, I turned it into a black and white image.  I also removed the yellow lines from the road which I thought were a little obtrusive, and applied a lighting effect to focus on the bikes a little more.

For the final image, I performed the same operations as I did for the black and white version, only this time I just faded the colour a little, while increasing the saturation on part of the bikes to draw more attention to them.

I think my favourite is the black and white image - I might even print and frame that one.

Finished Drawing

Well this is it - the first full-scale drawing I've finished in a long, long time.  It's difficult to get a sense of what it looks like here - as the original size is 91x61cms, but I will be producing prints from it of about half that size, partly because I feel it benefits from being a little 'tighter' and partly for purely commercial reasons, in that smaller prints tend to sell better.  Once the original was framed it would be very large, and it's more difficult for most people to find space in their home for something that size. You can see the original view which I produced the first sketches from here.  I have to say that this photograph is not entirely accurate, especially as it seems to have lost a little of its colour, but even so you can see that my version is much darker and more moody, bearing little resemblance to the original really. There's artistic licence for you - I always seem to produce drawings that way. Strangely it reminds me of something else in terms of it's 'feel' - possibly early 19th century german romantic art, maybe Samuel Palmer, or even an early Renaissance landscape. I'm not sure which.  However not of that was intentional - though I did specialise in studying landscape art of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, so maybe there's some subconscious influence there.

I worked the drawing up in charcoal, pastel, conte and wax crayons first, before photographing, uploading and digitally colouring it (not that you can really see the colour in these images).  I love the flexibility that this gives me to experiment to my heart's content, without fear of destroying what I've done so far. You could say it's my digital 'safety net', but in fact it's more than just that, and I'm keen to explore the interaction between digital and traditional art forms further, rather than simply using it as a tool to produce the 'perfect' image.

I needed to get this one finished, because I'm supposed to be taking part in an exhibition for our local Arts Festival at the end of September, and time is running out. I will be producing it as a limited edition print, so now I've got to try and make sure I print it out accurately.  Sometimes I find  this is the hardest part of the whole process!