Visual Journal Studio Brief 1 & Printed Pictures Studio Brief 3

About the Author

Visual Journal Studio Brief 1

Images that entered my head when thinking about Burroughs. Limited colour and media palette - pencils, charcoal and ink. 

Writing - Who? Why? Cultural, Historical, Text

Module Briefing

3 images/motifs that represent a theme that runs through Burroughs work or associated with Burroughs.

The main theme that comes into my head is heroin/drugs.

Intangible theme:
ADDICTION - gambling, drugs, smoking, money, sex, food, lying, alcohol, games, adrenaline, crime, pain, self harm, racing, authority, caffeine, exercising, fetishes, fame, internet, weight loss, over eating, masturbation, prayer, pornography, people pleasing, perfectionism, OCD, shopping, television, thrills, violence, work

Narrowed down:
DRUG ADDICTION - heroin, weight loss tablets, painkillers, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, magic mushrooms, MDMA, cocaine, ketamine, LSD, steroids, antidepressants, acid, aerosols, codeine, tramadol, crystal meth, diamorphine, ecstasy, glue sniffing, poppers, laughing gas, m-cat, meow meow, petrol

Narrowed this down again:
HEROIN ADDICTION
Intangible associates - lying, paralysis, alter ego, depression, high, secrets, desperation, struggle, pain, joy, thrill, weak, focused, unfocused, blur, other world, relaxed, ill

Tangible objects associated - needle, spoon, arm, belt, lighter, cuts, money, the heroin itself, veins

Out of these I have chosen: needle, arm and spoon.

10 images of each of the 3

NEEDLES

ARM

SPOONS

Pen experimentation of line

Two different types of line

Outlines

Foreground mid and background ideas

Collaging motifs

I chose the spoon as my motif as I thought this would be an interesting one to explore in collage. I wanted to use media that reflected being on drugs so quite vibrant and other-worldly.

The intangible - feelings of highs, lows, isolation, stripped bare, in too deep.. 

Visual Journal

PRINTED PICTURES Studio Brief 3

How do I Illustrate Burroughs as a series?

For the etching workshops and for the brief of a set of images illustrating either a book of his or him as a person for an interview, I had to figure out a way of illustrating him. I couldn't purely illustrate one of his books or just do a portrait of him. I had to think outside of the box as he does; he is a vibrant character and I want to create something a little bit wacky like him.
After speaking to others about it and my tutor I decided to look back at his life and maybe illustrate that as a series. Different parts of his life at different stages. I looked back at my research at the facts I found about him that weren't immediately apparent and were a bit bizarre and non-related to his books. His upbringing and childhood are most interesting to me because in my eyes that is what shaped the person he was later in life. Out of the list of facts I chose the ones that I felt I could best illustrate and that seemed a little random. I think this would work best to show an interview coming up with him because they are so random and you would want to find out about these stories and know more about him.

 Initial ideas:

Sold his typewriter for money for heroin 

Cut off his baby finger and gave it to his psychiatrist who reffered him to a mental institute                    

Lost his virginity to the boy in the next bunk bed

 Had his first gun at the age of 8

How to turn these ideas into etching/monoprints

I think that I definitely need more line and tone within the works. In order to get my head around this I tried out using pencil and then fine liner which worked better when creating and building up lines for tone. I had to imagine what this would look like on a copper plate so I inverted the image on photoshop to give me a better idea of where to add the lines.

It definitely works better with more detail rather than simple outlines like these :

Final image to take to workshop

Etching workshop

Preparing the plate :

Our plates were already sanded down for us so we just had to wax them and leave them to cool. 

I scratched into my plate the drawing that I had taken in with me. I thought this would take a long time but I was actually pretty fast at doing it as I'd studied the result I wanted from it. I found a nice tool with a rolling end to it that created tiny little dots which I felt worked really nice. 

The little dots worked well within the skin and also where the finger had appeared to be cut off as if blood was leaking out.

I put my plate in acid for half an hour. It didn't have much of a bite to it so I left it in for another half an hour to ensure all of the lines had taken.

In this time I made a mono print to decide which method would work best. I was not happy with the outcome of this as I felt the ink was far too thick and it didn't allow for me to add much detail. 

Etching outcome


I am really pleased with this result. I think it's a little darker than I would like, the only thing that I am dubious about is having to make everything work as a series, meaning I'd have to put this much detail into everything and that's not really my drawing style.





















This was a second print I did of the plate on a different machine which didn't have as much pressure and it came out really faint.






















I finally cleaned down my plate with oil

Contextual References

Etchings

Chrissy Norman

Joseph Austin 

Explaining his process

Lucian Freud

Monoprint 

Beth Berrimen

Tatana Kellner

Peter Gander

Thumbs

After my peer review I feel I need to draw out exactly what my printed images are going to look like now, with as much detail and tone as possible.

Then figure out which parts I want to etch in red rather than black. Then take a test piece down and etch it out see how it turns out.
In order to do this I need to gather reference material together to see exactly how I want things to look and play around with the composition to only include vital information.

(enter reference imagery pics)

I also looked into some illustrations of typewriters which were really nice

(enter typewriter illustrations)

Figuring out where to add the most detail to my drawings

(enter drawings)

PLAN OF WHAT TO DO NEXT

• Gather reference material to draw from
• Thumbnail some compositions
• Draw out exactly how I want the printed pictures to look in detail
• Take the thumb and bow plate (already done) and experiment with black and red ink

Coke sniffing sketch 

Progress tutorial

After a progress tutorial Eleanor thought that some of my images didn't work within a series when it came to the concept. She felt that the sniffing coca cola piece didn't match the others in terms of the message I was trying to convey. She also felt that the typewriter making money might convey that Burroughs was making money from his writing rather than the selling of the typewriter in order to buy cocaine. 

She felt what worked with the finger piece was it stood alone on it's own quite powerful and told me to think about symbols from the other pieces that would work alone. 

We went back through my sketchbook to my initial ideas and there were some she felt from there would work better. 

I decided to narrow it down to 5 :

1. Finger in a bow - This will be as normal, I may not even etch the plate again as it worked so well the first time I might use my initial plate
2. Feet in the bed - Rather than drawing out a full bunk bed we decided just the feet on their own would be powerful enough to symbolise sex
3. Pencil through the heart - Burroughs died of a heart attack and his last words were 'Love? What is love? The best painkiller" So the heart being pierced symbolises love and his writing due to the death of his wife. I am drawing the heart as a hand holding a pencil. 
4. Typewriter - We decided a typewriter on it's own would suffice, with some of the keys missing symbolising loss and the only letters left spell out junk
5. Yet to decide - I'm deciding between the toy box gun idea or hands cutting up some words

I started to draw up my ideas :

To do this I had to gather some reference material and play around with them in order to visualise what I wanted it to look like

Started writing after the loss of his wife

Lost his virginity to the boy in the next bunk bed

I think Eleanor was right that these would work better as a series because it makes you want to find out what they're about, pretty deep concepts.

Eleanor also said that the typewriter style I was looking at was more victorian and that I needed to find out what kind of typewriter Burroughs used, more 1950's. I researched this and a really good website gave me a list of writers and the typewriters they used

It stated many of his writings were done on a 1950's Remington. 

I also looked at broken typewriters and how I could draw keys missing from it

Etching idea

More or less this idea but home it down to just specific information I need, more keys sticking out, more missing and just 'junk' standing out more 

Sold his typewriter to get money for heroin

Lost keys symbolise loss, loss of words, just junk left

Hand scissors

Eleanor gave me the idea of doing something about how Burroughs cut up text, played around, placing them together. 

This made me think about perhaps doing some hands as scissors, quite literal but disturbing to fit with the aesthetic of the others. 

I researched into this more :

Scissors duly acquired, Burroughs began to apply Gysin’s method, and his excitement swiftly boiled over to his circle of friends and correspondents. Language, he came to believe, was a form of mind control, in which imposed or inherited concepts and ideas blocked true awareness of the world’s multiplicity. “You do not see the trees when you walk down the street,” he wrote to Ginsberg, “because of ‘The’ ‘Word’ ‘Tree’.” His interests led him to the linguistic programming techniques of the Scientologists, much explored in these letters, while his writing became an attempt to “cut the word lines … and step out into silence”. Before long he was pushing the technique on Ginsberg (“Cut Howl in with Rimbaud, Jack Kerouac or whatever”), on his 14-year-old son who sent him a poem (“I took a page of my writing and folded it down the middle and lay it over your poem which I had typed out”) and even on his ageing parents. His career became a running battle against received forms: “All writers of any consequence are psychic assassins in a very literal sense.”

Visualising

How do I make them look like scissors, but still like hands?

Composition & Format

I am worried that they won't all work as a series. 4 of them are related to body parts, then theres the typewriter which is becoming a problem. It doesn't work with the rest, and it is landscape I'd have to figure out a way of showing it portrait. Maybe by just picking out a section that has the most vital information. 

Working as a series

Transform the typewriter portrait using just the vital information. Have that central, to show the rest of his life revolved around that. Either side have the bow finger and feet as they are human parts. Next in either side would be the heart pencil and hand scissors as they involve tools that he worked with. 

Starting final etchings

I decided to prepare all plates at once so that I could etch into them from home and print them after Christmas. I feel my priority at the minute is animation and it would only take me a couple of sessions to print when we get back after the holidays. I prepared my plates and almost finished one etching in a morning so I am quietly confident that this will be okay

I inverted this on photoshop to see where I need to scratch into it more to get the darker tones this really helped me visualise it better

Adding colour to etchings

I thumbnailed ideas of where I could add colour to my etchings. After my original idea of red, I figured this may not reflect my themes of drugs overall within the module. In order to tie my printed pictures in with my moving pictures somehow I decided to use my dull yellowy black tones to highlight heroin. I think this adds more of a concept to the images and reflects drugs rather than death.
I decided to try this out on Photoshop to see if it would suit.

The problem:

I etched into my plates over the holidays and with me carrying them around and getting knocked the wax came away in places I didn't want it to, making it look rather messy. After a tutorial with Eleanor she said maybe try fill in the gaps with a small tool with wax or use it as a happy accident scratch into it more and add to the feel of the concept.

Solution:
I went into the print room and asked Lyndon and he gave me a liquid wax to paint on to block out the marks. It really neatened up my plates.

Problem :
Wanting to add yellow and black together meant that when I rubbed away the ink in both areas the colours were merging into one like a deep green colour that I didn't want

Solution :
I covered the yellow part with tissue paper while I rubbed away the black and vice versa

BIGGEST PROBLEM :

So I really took my time making sure my plates were neat and perfect. I added all of my plates into the acid for 40 minutes... and the wax had crumbled off in most places. This is when I realised my wax must have been way too thick. When I rinsed my plates, most of the information had been lost and had not took to the plate. A lot of my line work was gone along with the month that I spent drawing into my plates. I asked the technician what I could do.

Comparison of how it's meant to look compared to how it came out 

SOLUTION :

She said to take prints of each of the plates see how they turn out. They were really faint, the lines weren't deep enough. She said the only solution would be to re-wax the plates with a really thin coat so that I could see my original marks underneath and work back into them.
How did this make me feel? Stressed! I now have a week to do what originally took me a month alongside finishing my animation and other modules. I am also concerned that the last 4 prints will  not match my original plate and will not work as a set.

Problem :

I realised I'd drew my typewriter plate the wrong way round and when it printed it was all backwards - schoolboy error!

Solution :

Re-do it. Note to self : When you think you're etchings are going to work out perfect and you have all the time in the world, they won't... and you don't!

Trial & Error

As one of my etchings came out in reverse because I forgot that it would print that way I couldn't get my head around how I would do the text backwards or how it would look. The technician told me to use a mirror alongside my plate but I thought of a better idea. I opened the image of the typewriter into Photoshop and then flipped it horizontally so that it was a mirror image. I then used this as reference

After etching back into my plates and inking them up I then found that the prints were too faint. I spoke to the technician after thinking maybe I didn't scratch into the plates hard enough but he said that I probably pressed too hard with the scrim when wiping the ink off the plate. He showed me a better technique twisting the scrim in a circular motion for the excess and very gently using tissue paper to eliminate the ink from the line work. I got some pretty cool prints from this process but there were areas I wanted to work into more and needed to add yellow ink.

It made me re think the style of my plates. Originally I wanted clean crisp lines with no background but after seeing how these turned out they're much more fitting for Burroughs and I will encorporate these textures within my final outcomes; leaving the background messy.

Practice Prints

Yellow was way too thick here

 I really liked this one but it needed more background

Again more background needed and ink too thick in areas

One of the original ones where my plate had gone wrong, can see that it is faded as the lines werent deep enough

Another original where the plate went wrong

 Needed more background and more yellow ink

 Too faded, plate messed up

 I quite liked this one and i was stuck between choosing this and another for my final outcomes but it was a little too wonky on the paper

Again I really liked this one but I felt my final one had more depth in the background

Final Outcomes

Feedback

I was absent for the crit as I was really unwell but had left my work out previously ready to be presented and was left some really nice feedback about my prints