Category : ArtStart Diary

This week saw the arrival of yet another piece of kit – yeah it does seem to be a repeating theme – an Adonit Jot Touch 4. This thing’s a neat aluminium bodied stylus for the iPad, which communicates pressure sensitivity over Bluetooth. With 2048 levels of pressure, it more or less turns the iPad into a Wacom cintique. So as a result, I’ve basically reduced my “carry everywhere” kit from an A4 sketchbook, 2 pencils, an eraser and a paperback book, to an iPad Air and a pen.

The other major milestone is that I finished the Nervous Spaces ebook, and uploaded it to Apple’s iBooks store. So now we play the waiting game as Apple review it for “quality assurance”.

The week wrapped up with a final photo shoot of The Metaning, using the double-polarised technique. After painstaking effort to square up the camera to the wall so all four corners of the image would be in equal focus, it finally came together. The shoot was done in a couple of hours, and next week should see the entire ePub 3 version completed, now that I’ve got the process down from the Nervous Spaces book.

A week on more admin and housecleaning type stuff. All of the text bubbles for The Metaning have been scanned and isolated, ready to be used in digital versions – that should let me photograph the work without adding the actual speech bubbles, and then composite them in to get an iBooks as we’ll as hardcover versions done and on sale. At the moment the goal is to get the work onto the iBooks store before the Xmas break.

Thursday night I’m at an exhibition where one of my student works from ACP is being exhibited. In fact, I’m in a park typing this right now as I wait to go to the gallery – seriously loving the new iPad :)

Later on – The week ended with building a new eBook version of the Nervous Spaces book, which should be available soon. The exhibition print was the one I’d hoped would be printed, so I’ll get to pick it up soon.

This week has been about fine-tuning the positioning of the studio camera setup for photographing The Metaning, as well as processing photos from last week’s derby bout – all 700 plus of them. The other big time suck was on setting up and integrating a new piece of kit – a new iPad Air. Something that’s really impressive about it is the ability to display photographs on a large and high quality screen – which means if I want to show stuff to galleries, I don’t have to get them to use a computer etc. The touchscreen keyboard is pretty amazing – I find I can type just as fast, if not faster on it than I can on a regular one.

Some other good news, one of my works is going to be printed for the Australian Centre of Photography term 3 student exhibition. Opening night is Thursday.

Monday started with the first texts of the Cross-Polarisation setup. To say it was a success is an understatement. The technique is an absolute triumph. The linked image has a comparison of the same lighting positions using just the polarising filter on the camera, vs the camera filter & polarising gels in front of the lights. As can be seen, all the ink lines are jet black, and all the surface sheen is gone from the areas of flat black. Especially apparent is the difference in the Magnart on the left vs the right.

Tuesday saw the start of the start of the rubber cement tests for speech bubbles, and sadly, I’m not sure it’s going to work out. There’s quite a lot of over-gooing around the edges of the speech bubbles, and erasing it isn’t working as well as I’d hoped. I may have to switch to spray adhesive, which is also acid free, but possibly more brittle when dry.

On Friday I went to Sculpture By The Sea, which as always, has a wonderful mix of works. There’s the formalist steel pieces, the “big” things, site specific works, more or less every genre of sculpture. I’m continuing my thoughts about how to best set up my work for next year’s exhibition.

Saturday was spent at the grand final of Sydney Roller Derby League. Here’s a selection of pics from the first ,grand final bout:

And some from the bout to decide third place.

This week has been devoted to yet more text updating. All of the lettered text boxes had to be laminated with spray adhesive to a second sheet of tracing paper, and then carefully cut out with scissors.

I started running tests with the polarising filter, and it works pretty well. I decided to close the loop on techniques for photographing art and get a a pair of polarising gels for the lights. With these I can start trying cross-polarised lighting, which should remove the glare from the ink lines, and flat areas of black on the work. That’ll be the next stage of testing.

The other nifty thing, is I registered the “metaning.net” domain, and with a “the” subdomain, the.metaning.net will be available as a publicity site for The Metaning.

This week has been spent on getting the text for The Metaning written out. I went and bought a bunch of tracing paper from a drafting supplies place, and  printed out page after page of consolidated speech bubbles (the A3 printer has SO been worth its weight and space). Taping these down on board, and the tracing paper on top, I’m able to ink the letters and speech bubbles. The polarising filter I ordered for my camera arrived, so I’ll be able to start experimenting with lighting positions again, to try to eliminate the reflection off the ink. I’ll also scan the speech bubbles, so worst case scenario, I can add them digitally if they can’t be photographed. That’s a tad meta in itself, scanning the hand drawn speech bubbled so they can look like they were photographed on the work.

I also output some final versions of my photography exercises from the various photography classes I’ve done at ACP. These are entries for the term 3 exhibition, so fingers crossed, they’ll be accepted.

More big news on the ArtStart checklist – my iBooks store account has become active, which means I can now begin uploading and selling ePubs / iBooks documents.

This week was filled with rewrites on The Metaning. The updated script is a considerable improvement over the original, which suffered from an excess of anger, and an under-cooked explanation of the basic premise it was created to argue. Now, there are considerably longer passages of text, and the anger has softened.

I bought an interesting bit of gear this week, a small magnesium 3-way tripod head from Manfrotto.

Friday night I went to the Sydney Roller Derby League bout and shot a bunch of long exposure action  pieces. Here’s the selects from the 500+ images taken.

After problems with the previous attempts to photograph The Metaning, namely, reflections off the black ink, this time around there was success. The difference was in altering the position of the lights, to about 160-170 degrees apart. Here’s a couple of actual size crops from the shots. There hasn’t been any processing of these, although the colour has shifted a bit in the sRGB jpeg process. The cropped bits of the pages here are about 8-10 cm wide, so you can see a fairly high degree of detail has been captured. That’s the important thing with this exercise – to archive the artefact itself, not just the drawn image.

The other interesting achievement this week has been to work out the system for creating speech bubbles for the full size original pages of The Metaning. After a number of experiments, the final formula was to use two sheets of tracing paper. After printing the speech bubble text on ordinary paper, I then trace the new letters and border in ink on the tracing paper. Once that’s dried, it’s laminated to a second layer of tracing paper with spray adhesive, and pressed flat. After everything’s cured, the bubble is cut out, and then glued onto the page with rubber cement.

The advantage of rubber cement is that it’s acid free, forms a flexible bond and is removable. I’d more or less forgotten about this stuff, it used to be used in graphic design in the days of manual paste-up and hot wax, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and desktop publishing was a newfangled marvel of modern technology.

This is the week I cracked the EPUB puzzle. Monday evening saw the first development version of The Metaning up and running on iOS devices. Tuesday saw another leap, as I converted the project to EPUB3 iBooks format, which means I was able to ditch the skeuomorphic paper stack and spine dip look, and just get the flat page spreads.

I feel really hyped about this, as it’s a major road block surmounted in getting not only The Metaning, but also Surfing The Deathline out in a saleable digital form. These were significant parts of my ArtStart plan.

Saturday & Sunday nights saw photography runthroughs of The Metaning, at both f5.6 and f8. While 5.6 is allegedly the sharpest aperture for my lens, f8 looks sharper to my eye. Unfortunately, I’m running into a problem with the ink lines picking up a reflection from the lights, so I’ve got to do some more experimenting with positioning to see if I can get around it.

In other news, I found out I’ve been accepted to the University of Western Sydney Sculpture Award and Exhibition for 2014, crossing off another ArtStart goal to apply for and be accepted into exhibitions. It’s a nice morale pick-me-up after missing out on Hidden at Rookwood, Willoughby, Woollarha and the John Fries exhibitions. I’m going to be reworking some themes and materials I’ve used before, and hopefully will be able to create something that’s small enough to be practical (and able to be disassembled), yet large enough to sit in an enclosed yet outdoor context.

After almost a year of planning, 7 grand in equipment and training, and almost 3 months into my ArtStart grant, here is the culmination – the first completed typical photo from my studio setup.

The chain of tools for this is pretty epic – the Nikon D800 camera is tethered via USB to the computer, which is able to activate the shutter and capture images directly to Aperture. The camera has an Elinchrom Skyport plugged in which fires off the RX4 monobloc flashes. The other bit of kit that kindof closes the loop on setting and measuring the lighting is a Gossen Digisky lightmeter. This little marvel not only measures the light put out by the RX4s, but uniquely, it can speak the Elinchrom Skyport protocol. So, when making a meter reading you can dial up or down on the power from the lights using the meter, without having to round the back of the lights to adjust them, and importantly without having to go over to the skyport on the camera, where I could potentially bump it.

Other things that happened this week, I had an in-studio consult with my lighting teacher, to get all the lights configured, did some web consulting with an old high school buddy about his new business venture, and spent the rest of the time putting my  SketchUp skills to good use, continuing with Surfing The Deathine.