Framed Graphite

It took a while, but I got this task done. (Click for a slightly larger view.)Things take a lot longer these days, because…newborn. You’ll recall that I did a little drawing of the youngster very soon after his arrival in December. Well, it was decided a while back that it should be on display on a wall in the house rather than hide in my notebooks like my other sketches tend to do. This was a great honour, but presented me with difficulty. I have a rule to not take any pages out of my notebooks. You’ll think it is nuts, but you’ll find that this madness is shared by many people who keep notebooks/sketchbooks. Somehow the whole thing is a Thing, if you know what I mean. To tear a page out would be a distortion of the record…. it would spoil the archival aspect of the book. (Who am I kidding? I don’t think it likely that future historians will be poring over my notebooks… but I know that future Clifford will be, and it will be annoying to find a gap.) (It is sort of like deleting comments from a discussion on a blog post. I try not to do that without good reason, and I leave a trail to show that it was done if I must.)

Anyway, where was I? Ah. Pages. Well, I had to find a way of making a framed version of the drawing that kept the spirit and feel of the drawing intact while not tearing the thing out of the book. Turned out that it took me so long to do it in the end that it would have been quicker to redraw the drawing, making a copy of it. (Actually, that’s awfully good practice!) The young boy was not super-happy all day and I was on call to look after him for most of the day and so what should have been relatively simple tasks took forever to do since I’d get a few minutes, and then have to tend to him, and over and over again. In addition, I discovered that my camera introduces some strange artefacts that I had to clean up very carefully using photoshop (after setting up a tripod outside to photograph the drawing in full well-lit conditions – I find this is better than scanning), using a combination of careful brushstrokes (a multiply brush) and grabbing bits of background with the lasso tool and moving them subtly around to repair the artefacts. Yesterday I’d a bit of free time to allow me to go hunting for some really good paper on which to print, and found archival quality Canson stock (Edition Etching Rag, 310 gsm, in the Infinity series, in case you’re taking notes) which has a rather nice cream finish.

Then after getting it all right (I thought) -adjusting levels and so forth- and printing a few test copies on regular paper I went for it and put one of my Canson sheets in…. only to discover that my Brother printer’s automatic feed can’t deal with that sort of paper. Too thick and fancy. And there was no manual feed either. Fine. That meant that I had to bite the bullet and get around to fixing my Epson printer which is much better suited to the job (it is a large format Workforce that I use for printing out large art boards for working on the graphic book)… It has been having paper feed problems for a while and I just did not have time to fix it. So I decided to fix it. You can imagine how long that took while looking after the youngster.. but I did in the end. But now I needed to start all over again with print settings since it talks to my desktop applications entirely differently from the Brother (sometimes disastrously so… even when being careful to use the right drivers and so forth…) So this took a while… but in the end, after printing at least 20 test versions over the course of the day, I got the desired result. I had a nice frame to hand along with some nice grey card for making a mask, and so finally put it all together before baby’s bath time. Hurrah!

I *must* write down the settings I used for everything (both in the camera and in photoshop and for outputting to the printer) somewhere safe (like in an update to this post?) since now I have cracked the task of making nice reproductions of my notebook pencil drawings for printing. (For pencil, mark you… I’m sure I’ll have to do more work to get the watercolours and other work to look right too…)

So now to get the hammer and picture hooks.

-cvj