making things

digital prints!

Today I used the risograph printer! I hadn't used it in a while, so yesterday when I came in I took a long time and essentially got nothing done. Today I actually used the single drum, which I never use, and it was really easy! I don't know who convinced me the two drum was better, the single drum is so much easier.

Here are some photos of the process. I was so unlucky yesterday, the pink and the yellow were both running low, so I had to swap the pink out for red and improvise by double printing the yellow.

They turned out ok but I do wish I had more time to reprint the mermaid ones. The pixie prints, which I did today on the single drum, came out so much more vivid, they make the mermaid look dull. i think, even though its not perfect, they both look great, inconsistencies are the beauty of using these types of printers.

As for the registration, they look really good, the image was really well aligned – I had some trouble figuring out the manual adjustment on the single drum at first, but after some text prints I managed to find out you have to adjust it inversely (meaning if the print is off by 1 mm to the right, you have to push it one to the left – because the print is actually printed on the back of the paper and upside-down, so its reversed). It’s hard to see but the first picture is the two-drum, you can adjust the registration on there just by using the left/right and up/down buttons. In the second image, it show the single-drum, on that one you can only change the height of the image, so to change how close it is to the left or right hand side, you have to use a manual gear.

Today I finally started digital drawing. I selected the best reference pictures from the ones I took on Tuesday and have started to come up with an outline for the final thing. At first I wanted to make a series of 3, but from the sketches and citrus I took, there are only really 2 that I feel super confident with illustrating.

These illustrations are based of the the initial sketches I made while I was still in Portugal.

I had another three that I didn't like as much, so for now I'm working on these. I did take some elements from the three I didn't like, because I thought why worked with the pixie and the mermaid.

Today I finally got to take the reference pictures I needed for my digital drawing. I asked my other cousin if she could pose for me and she was free this afternoon! Last week when I went to my local leisure centre (where I sued to go swimming as a kid) to pick up my membership car, I asked if I could have a look around and found that the ballet studio was still there and empty most days.

I decided to take the pictures there, as the lighting was good and it had a lot of space.

I have been home in Portugal this week and was supposed to have started digital drawing ages ago, but I found a baby kitten on friday and haven't had the chance to sit on photoshop yet.

I've mostly been sketching, form reference pictures of different poses and angles. I've been thinking about perspective, how we see things and how they see us. So I thought that for a project on the male gaze, it would make sense for the viewer to be looking down on the figure (which is going to be a woman). Not only does this mirror the way women are seen in media, it will also offer an interesting way to play with proportions.

In the sketches I have done, I had some trouble finding middle-weight women for references in the poses I wanted. I had initially asked my cousin to pose for me tomorrow, but as it's her freshers week still, I think I'll have to find someone to do it back home with.