After the 50 and some birds were all installed at PixLife I went out for a walk along the beach. It was one of those hot days we have more and more often. And so I was the only one walking there along the shoreline still wearing his shoes. Plenty vacationers on the beach and in the water. All of a sudden there it was, somewhere in a lull, the beach less busily occupied, a single little Ringed Plover.

The signal was clear. This one had to be made. It had been a while since I’d made a new bird print anyhow. Writing and compiling a book and worrying about writing and compiling a book tends to take time. I did not immediately start (see previous sentence), but eventually took up the work at the beginning of August.

Design considerations

The Ringed Plover has a lot of white parts on its body, so I picked a coloured paper to provide a contrasting background for those strong black and white markings on chest and head.

As always, the Gestalt came first; the overall posture and silhouette. It would be walking to the right, away from us, with a general air of industriously dribbling along. It clearly has things to do, places to go.

I ususally do not talk about work in progress, but for accountability sake and as a teaser for what’s coming I shared a design study with the collectors and enthousiasts on my mailing list (to which you can subscribe here) with a general message of ‘just about finished, ready to print the edition’.

Well, you can guess how that turned out. Too large brown upper part, too little white undersides. Feet in uncomfortable anges and a bit too low on its feet as a whole. Turns out, again, that seemingly 80% done actually means just about halfway complete. Getting the details in posture and proportions exactly right takes time, patience and attention. (I can probably repeat this little lament with every print I make. Will do!)

As soon as everyting was exactly in its place, and the correct colours were defined I could start printing. It’s a very nice sight to see all those sheets together in the drying rack. There’s still quite some work to do, but it’s clear what needs to happen and consists mostly of a concetrated execution of a fixed set of actions.

Anyway: done. The edition consists of fifty prints. The first ten prints go with free shipping. Run!

What does it mean to do creative work, when many of the parameters for the work are, by design, as yet undefined?

One useful approach is to timebox the work. Allow for around two and a half hours of dedicated work on The Thing. You’ll often need at least an hour just to activate enough of the necessary ingredients before you can start cooking.

When I’m making prints that means it takes a good hour for there to be ink on a large enough number of printable elements that allow for interesting combinations to emerge.

Then from that point on there’s another hour or so of energy and attention available in which the new thing may happen, the work can be teased to the surface.

Go on longer and mistakes of the kind you don’t want will start to happen, possibly ruining that piece that was quite good already.

A session is two and a half hours long, and that takes about three hours. Work through that first hour to activate the materials and ideas, then go with the flow for another hour or so. Then wrap up.

The unit of creative work is a session.

Operational. Maybe not quite finished yet, but operational. Compare this with two weeks ago.

Saturday 30 May will be open house at VONK 3. You’re invited to drop by and check the state of things in real life!

A design study for the Little Owl print. The overall posture and shape are allmost in place here, but as you can see, I was still figuring out the right approach for the eyes and beak. The frontal view made it hard to style the beak and that’s why I eventually ended up designing a three-quarter view.

This was the personal studio space since the start of the year. A cozy setup in the attic at home. Always meant to be temporary and indeed, the end of this is in sight as my new space in VONK 3 is now ready to be furnished.

So far I have removed all the carpet tiles, moved in some tables and chairs and put some white paint on the walls.

Very much looking forward to be able to work there.

Update: two weeks later.

Printing to clean the forme gets interesting results at times.

My Print & Play students are very talented.

My Print & Play students are very talented.

In the performing arts, the work is described in a form that is different from how it is performed. The score for a piece of music, the script for a play, these function like a recipe for how the performance can executed.

What might the score for a visual work look like? In a way that leaves room for variation in its performance? That question became the starting point for the print series Sporadic. The score consists of a notation of position and rotation for a number of visual modules. By varying the selection of which module is place where, different versions are created. Each time, the score is performed using different instruments.

Both the score and a couple of different performances of it are on show at the Volume #8 zines exhibition in Grafisch Atelier Hilversum.

Due to unforseen extra busy-ness last December and January I just about managed to create my Koppermaandag print for this year. At least in the week that it should have been shared. First Monday after the Christian feast day of Epiphany is the date for this printers’ new year tradition. I finished mine the Friday after so that I could at least hand out a few at the new years drinks in the printmaking studio.

Of course, Ton was on time, on Monday January 12, finding a playful connection between Personal Knowledge Management and his own (Personal) KopperMaandag print.

As for mine, it was an exercise in layering multiple layers of inks of the oil based type, which I do have less experience with compared to the water based ones. It re-uses a small bird motif I designed for another project. Since it was an experiment printing wise, I of course couldn’t help myself and printed all kinds of variations just to see what happens.

The Dutch text is an inversion of our version of lights, camera, action. A literal translation would be spot off, lights on.

Yes, the other way around. Because ‘spot’ also means mockery.