Philip Eight

It was a heavy few nights of printing last week as co:lab set about the second of our team tasks. The brief we set ourselves this time was to create, within the space of a week (give or take allowances for general real life shenanigans), an A4 advert suitable for two colour printing. Those were our only spec. The product, concept, ideal or whatever we set out to promote was entirely ours to choose.
This is my contribution...

Philip Eight, the brand, has become synonymous with magnificent fashion and the most elegant of fragrances. Beloved of the great and the good.
We see here an advert for a new man smell designed for the fat glossies. Although originally conceived as an initial yellow layer plastered over with a second black layer, inspiration kicked in and I decided to try out the florescent pink, caking it in a second coat of raw umber. The pink was magnificent and when shining through the raw umber the colours joined in a deep regal red. I have 18 of these, signed and numbered.
We'd set aside a full night for each of the co:lab designs so I decided to plough on and try a variant on the initial yellow idea... unwittingly treading on the same error Jono and I had made with the screw picture from co:lab 1b. Yellow, it appears, is a remarkably difficult colour to work with when overlapping colours. It seems to lack punch and struggles to hold definition. We printed 21 sheets with a base colour yellow and proceeded to work through 4 alternatives (many of which delivered oddly hazy results) before getting excited about the blend of the yellow with the florescent pink which we had stumbled upon earlier in the process while fooling around. I have 11 of this final combination, signed and numbered.

Addendum: Having seen the workings for these prints Philip Eight has ask Andrew to become his official biographer and over the coming months his life will be documented in pictures at philipeight.blogspot.com.

Works in progress

Here's a wee sample of what's being worked on at the moment.

The three layers on the left make up the turtles print. This is being produced as a test, experimenting with a dense brush technique and multiple colour overlays. If the results are promising the approach should lead on to other experimentation which in turn should lend itself to larger works I have in mind.
The layers on the right make up the boxerfish print. This is more a piece produced for fun although certain challenges in the colour management and how information is to be related adds to the value of the experience.

The Co:Lab team at Unique Presence

Big thanks to everyone who came along to Unique Presence to witness the Co:Lab live debut on Saturday 5th December. We were all extremely please with how it went and greatly appreciate the enthusiasm shown. It was a long day starting at 2pm in the Islesburgh Community Centre and the first half was especially busy. We're glad however to have been able to keep the show open until 9pm, welcome the folk keeping less regular hours and sell them prints! Hopefully all the prints sold will settle happily into their new homes and earn a quizzical look or a toothy smile from time to time.

Thanks must also be extended to Karen Bruce of Vunk Photography and Mootie House Designs for organising the event and inviting us to participate. The Drama Room at the community centre was a great space in which to exhibit and looked particularly vibrant when filled with the textiles, jewellery, photography (and prints) of independent local artists and designers (Vunk Photography, Mootie House Designs Ltd, K J Originals, Jane Naish Jewellery ...)

For anyone who couldn't make it along, never fear, we're hoping to give you another chance to pick up a print very soon. Watch this space for details!

Co:Lab - Tag Team take two and exhibition news!

Following on from the first stage collaborations between Andrew Morrison, Beto and Jono Sandilands we have repeated the process in reverse! Which is to say, Jono, having received Beto's art to work first time around and his piece having gone Andrew's way, this time Jono's illustration went Beto-wise while Beto's effort was passed to Andrew!
Interesting and educational results... particularly in the instance of failure experienced in the first attempt on two of this series' collaborations – solved with advanced colour consideration.

The work from both stages in this Co:Lab project are to debut, for one day only, this weekend at Unique Presence, an exhibition of print, photography and textiles with sales of original artwork and contemporary gifts. If you're in Lerwick on 5th December any time between 2pm and 9pm then swing by the Drama Room at Islesburgh Community Centre. There are only 40 of each obscenely affordable print so be mindful not to miss out!

These photos by Jono Sandilands

Tag team fun with Jono & Beto

The results!, originally uploaded by newdeadlanguage.

Andrew Morrison recently joined Jono Sandilands and Roberto Getto in a 3week tag team screen printing experiment. For the first week they each created an A4 image which was passed to another member of the trio who would then for the second week create another A4 image to overprint this with. Third week saw the printing! Here are the results. Watch this space for news of a second set of these and more fun from the trio!

Belonging on Flickr

Belonging, originally uploaded by newdeadlanguage.

All nine of the prints from the Belonging series can now be seen over on Flickr. The exhibition in the Bonhoga Gallery Cafe has been extended by a month so if you've not been, there's still time to get along.

Belonging

Back in March we posted about funding awarded to Andrew Morrison of New Dead Language to put toward purchasing equipment and materials which would aid in the production of a body of work suitable for exhibition.

Well, Andrew has been working fairly intensively for the past six month's and will this week share the result of this with the world at large!
Belonging is a set of nine two colour prints. Each print captures a moment, a single 'cell' or 'still', suggestive of a greater whole. There is a potent untold back story and unknown outcome. Each one was conceived independently of the others with the only common thread being a sense of era. The idea however is that by grouping them into random sets, in random order, the viewer will instinctively draw a line through them, making connections and conjuring a story in their own imagination. The hope is for every person who looks at a set of these prints to find their own personal interpretation, vivid and entirely unique to themselves. And by rearranging the nine time and again (or simply by reordering a set of three or four or what have you) the worlds in these prints are continually altered. What may have seemed serene may turn sinister, or a gesture or glance which in one instance appeared benevolent can in another suggest malevolence.
Each print has been pulled, signed and numbered of 40 by the artist.
Belonging has it's opening tomorrow evening (2nd September 2009) at the Bonhoga Gallery Cafe where it will hang for the duration of the month. Another set will also be exhibited at this weekend Wordplay Book Festival.

Andrew will post photos of the collection on our Flickr page early next week. In the meantime you can read how it all came to fruition by visiting www.twitter.com/newdeadlanguage