• waterclourOkay, so it feels like it’s been raining for ever, but that’s not why I’m browned off.

    I’m browned off because I keep keep gravitating towards Burnt Sienna and Burnt Umber in my watercolour paint box. Brown, brown, brown.

    I learned a valuable lesson about water colours at art school. Colin McNaughton
    , the Children’s Book Author and Illustrator, used to teach us one day a week. In fact it was he who is responsible for recognising that children’s books is where my talents lay. He looked at my portfolio and asked to see my paint box. He ceremoniously removed the black and the white and threw them away!

    I was a little surprised at the time, but thrilled at the effect. Black water colour paint makes water colours look dirty and white ruins the essential water colour effect.

    Colour is only the wavelength of light that you see reflected from surfaces. The light from water colours comes from the white of the paper. The paint is a thin translucent layer on top. The light from the paper shines through the paint in the same way that a light shines through a film slide to be projected on the wall.

    I traded black for Neutral Tint, a a very dark blue/grey colour that I use for shadows. It works pretty well and can be used without dirtying up a picture.

    My other teachers question whether I was colour blind and did tests on me. I was fine. Maybe no one showed me how to use water colour properly. Maybe I just picked up a load of bad habits and no one put me right. We are all a bit loathe to criticise an artists style for seeming stupid ourselves or for injuring the artist’s Ego.

    I now realise that I use browns too much. Maybe it’s because I live in the northern hemisphere, where we are surrounded by dull light and dead leaves for more than half the year. Whatever, the browns muddy up my pictures, so I’m going to experiment.

    I’m not going throw them away, I’m going to confine myself to the three process colours, Yellow, Cyan and Magenta. I’m going to mix my colours and try to keep them bright. When I’ve played with these colours before, I’ve always been thrilled at the brightness and purity of colour that can be achieved.

    I’ve been using premixed colours from a digital palette in my screen for the last few years. Using colours that are ready mixed is, I suppose, a bit lazy. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

  • I had a great conversation this weekend about eBooks. My friend, Sal, proudly told me that she had seen an eBook recently. I assumed she meant a piece of software. I wanted to know what it was called. When I realised that that she was talking about hardware, I couldn’t get the name of the machine from her because she didn’t actually care what it was called or which model it was.

    She didn’t like the idea of an eBook reader and couldn’t see anyone ever wanting to use one. This is the standard argument I get from my generation. We have been brought up to revere books and cannot imagine why you would want to read from a small screen that requires batteries, that doesn’t have a tactile finish or the smell of paper. She could see that it would be better to carry a Kindle in your bag rather than half a hundredweight of school books, but you’d never want to curl up with one in bed.

    The younger generation get it. Tactility and smell can be engineered in. In ten year’s time we will have an eBook reader that will be soft, tactile and friendly. It will read to you, if you are doing something else. But it will do more.

    It will take photos and video – connect you to all your friends and family with video and sound – it will alert you to all the updates from faceBook etc. that it has learned that you are interested in – it will be your tv and online movie download box – don’t like the screen size? It will have a projector in the back so just find a wall (It will adjust size, brightness and focus for you). It will keep your calendar, to-do list and just about everything else up to date, as it will talk to your friend’s machines to adjust meetings and deadlines for you. It will be your secretary and friend when you need someone to talk to. It will be like…

    Actually the nearest thing I can think of what it will be like is the Daemons in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials / Northern Lights” trilogy. Daemons are human souls that live on the outside of the body and take the shape of animals. There’s no reason, eBook readers, or whatever these converged gadgets will be called, can’t become self-propelled and animal shaped! In fact, why not call them Daemons?

    A year ago, I would not have seen the point of watching TV on a 3 inch screen. But TED or YouTube on my iPhone is brilliant. I don’t want to watch long movies. I want to watch snippets of information. Things move on, but our understanding and expectations don’t. We assume that what we have now is the right thing and that it should always stay that way. It’s what the Candle manufacturers thought, as well as the wheelwrights and the slide rule designers. Things move on.

    As my friend Sal says. Assume makes an “Ass” out of “u” and “me”!

    So why should we imagine that it’s better to cut down trees, make books and transport them to bookshops or libraries when it is so much easier to download them to a kindle? I’m sure the Monks thought the same about hand written texts on parchment when the book was invented. Things move on.

    Except… I read an article yesterday at businessinsider.com that showed it was cheaper for The New York Times to give all its readers a Kindle for free, rather than print paper copies.

    Read down to the comments, and there is an argument I’ve never heard before made by someone called IntellectGetOne. This is what he says:

    The electronic only-idea completely misses the “badge” marketing value of the NY Times being physically seen in airports, hotels, convenience stores, offices, trains, driveways, etc.

    Remember this simple motto: Out of sight, out of mind.

    With no physical paper on the shelves or driveways or offices, The Times will easily need to spend $300 mill. in marketing to keep it’s name front and center and relative in this day and age.

    Of course! Why did I never think about taht before. The book is not only the product, it is it’s own marketing device. Lying around on coffee tables, being read by someone on the bus or train, sitting on the bookshelf at home or in the library, the book is it’s own advertising billboard.

    When you choose a book online, you have probably seen it already in a shop or you’ve seen the author holding a copy on the TV.

    You may choose to buy information online, but as an eBook? Would it not be much better to subscribe to an authoritative online resource that keeps being updated? With full-time, mega-speed, always on wireless internet, information is just there, available 24/7. Who would need to download a block of information that soon goes out of date?

    But those who wish to read novels, (they are called novels because they too were a novel idea once), will be able to carry on buying them as wood pulp. Books are a brilliant technology. But they are more than just a content delivery mechanism. When it comes to fiction, the shape, the smell, the weight, the quality of paper and print, the binding, the art and typography all go to make the experience different and memorable.

    And the book stands as its own advertising billboard. How much would you have to pay to promote an eBook that sits waiting in the endless ether, with all it’s competitors alongside. How would you differentiate yours from the rest and get anyone to pay attention. What would the author hold up in front of the cameras. How could they say, “I wrote this,” without something physical to show for it? It’s the reason the paperless office never happened – why people print out emails and PDFs. When you’ve worked hard on a piece of writing, you want to hold it in your hands – to feel the weight of the words.

  • I have a story to write. I went to sleep thinking about it. Actually, I’ve been thinking about it all week. I knew that I had to sketch out the physical environment of the story to make it flow properly. I went to sleep last night confident that I could draw it out quickly.

    This morning I woke fresh from a great night’s sleep and lay in bed awhile, planning the story a little more.

    By the time I got to my desk, ready to get to work, life had intruded. Emails to answer. My diary needed checking against my son’s University visiting days. It’s half-year end for tax payments. That took up most of the morning. Working out how I’m going to pay it, involved forward financial projections, followed by a bit of invoice chasing on the phone.

    Then I thought I might as well get a couple of online forms filled in, otherwise they too will hang over me. Then I filled in a festival appraisal form.

    It’s now just gone two in the afternoon and I’ve finally got my five minutes to draw my little plan. I feel I can get down to the writing now, except that I need to got to the bank and the bookshop, which reminds me of something else I have to do online.

    If I worked for someone else, they would have departments to handle all these things. I’m often asked if writers and illustrators write or draw all day – they would like to, but unfortunately the business of life gets in the way.

    In Ireland, creative people don’t pay tax. The amount of income tax Creatives pay is minimal compared to the amount of work and tax their brains creates for other people. Tax and general interaction with authority is something that creative people don’t really get. We would create so much more if we didn’t have to waste all our time sorting out all the bloody paperwork, and forward planning to try and have some money available for when the tax comes due. Payments never coincide with tax due dates!

    It’s too much hassle to move to Ireland, and any way, I hear they are giving up that scheme soon. They need every penny they can squeeze out of the system. It’s a fool’s economy, but what do the economist know? They created all the mess in the first place.