Cricketts Inky Art Blot

Continuing with my series, I have been working on a linocut featuring an old fashioned alarm clock and an eye. I used an a la poupee dabber to add a smokey white to the eye and the clockface. I found a dial stamp at a scrapbook store and inked it with my speedball ink and brayer to add to the clock. I then carved an eye detail from soft cut to stamp back over the eye. I used a red Bic pen then carved with a number one blade. I then stamped this over the eye. The final step was printing hands onto the clock, which I did Friday.

I have enlarged a few tradigital art pieces and framed them. I am getting quite excited about this direction and already have a few new images in my head for the next pieces. Not the best of phone photos, sorry!

I have been working on a ton of tradigital pictures over the last 2 or 3 weeks. I had 145 proofs printed over the weekend and excitedly picked them up this morning. I have picked a handful out to be 20 x 30 photos and about 20 to be 8 x 10 photos. Tradigital art is where a computer generated image has been formed from a traditional fine art piece as it's base. I used some of my oil paintings and hand carved fine art prints as my foundation image and digitally altered them to make the final piece of work. I'm really excited about this work and the direction it is taking me in. My influences and inspiration for this work come from art movements from the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. Here are the sneaky peaks: These are going to be 20 x 30 prints:

I'm working on the peacock paintings at the moment and some relief prints. I am slowly filling in the shapes and colors of the paintings, starting from the top and working down with each color. I'm grouping them with my 8 color reduction cut relief print. Also a feather linocut and painting, both in their early stages. The linocuts below are variation experiments based on the imagery above. It still feels like I am a long way to completion, but hopefully they will pull together fast at the detail stage.

Moving on slowly but surely. I am having fun mixing up the paint. There is something very sensual about paint mixing and the smell of linseed oil is simply heaven! It is difficult to see progress, but I am hoping that the paintings will all come together quickly towards the end. In other news, the pond is now full :-) but full of sticks and blossom after the heavy winds last night :-(

I don't know why, but I go back and forth over whether my work will be good enough to show. Maybe this is what every artist feels or maybe it is me being unbalanced. I have always been this way. When I was still a student in art school, I burnt pretty much an entire years work thinking it sucked and smashed the ceramic sculptures I had to hand. Lucky for me, half the sculptures were in storage at the school. I had not documented the paintings and wish to this day that I had. I don't know if it is nostalgia, but I think back to that work and think it was the best I have ever done. Too bad, too sad as my kids say. Next month is NadaDada and I am nowhere near finished. Actually, not one single piece is finished. Why am I so lame at deadlines? I wonder if it is possible to fill 2 rooms of a gallery with just a month to go. I have been thinking of different ways to fill the room, or to paint abstracts that could be knocked out fast... My integrity is better than that I hope, bu