Thursday 7 February 2013

Day off Ramble about art.


The government say they haven’t done a U-turn on exams, but it was the only news item I could think of for a quick cartoon. 





So much for that the video which I can see won’t embed, sort of done it now although a bit small. 

I have bought myself an electric rubber, having just taken the thing out of the packet the video is a first attempt demo. It’s called a Jacar battery operated eraser pen and cost £3.30 including postage on ebay.

I will add to this blog post as I play with thing, it may be a fairly slow process as I don’t usually use a rubber much, truth is I am far to lazy to keep drawing things and rubbing them out.

As you can see from the cartoon at the top of the post, rubbing out is pretty much an all or nothing process inasmuch as most of it could do with rubbing out and doing again, I guess some bits are worse than others.


I tried with the pencil a bit, the idea was I would draw something, watercolour it and then rub the pencil out, fraid in the end I lost patience. At this point a rather noisy and rapid card game started here, so I just sketched it with watercolour.

I doubt it will photograph that well but it should expand if you click on it.



 
The picture of the state of the inside of my pencil case is relates to a comment. 



Update the thing that I needed the most - and I guess this mostly applies mostly to me - because for the most part I paint and draw when I am out and about has been delivered. This is what I call a propelling rubber and says “papermate speederase” on it.



Initial tests on poor quality coarse paper suggest it will be ok.  



  



Now in theory I should be able to take a sketch note like this, paint over the top of it and then rub out the dreadful sketch, in practice I think it  would be much easier to start again.   



Anyway if I ever get the time there is the subject matter for a Findus horse meat cartoon, at the moment it is too similar to the one I did about the horse meat in the Tesco burgers to bother with, perhaps I will have a better idea.    

One of those days when there didn't seem to a moment to get anything done, I did manage a sketch in the Belgian Cafe, here it is


6 comments:

  1. O.K. Michael, so it didn’t cost as much as mine, what you have got to understand is everyone thinks we have a lot of money down hear in Hampshire, so they put what we call pensioner tax on everything!
    Seeing you use the rubber reminded me of what my Dad was always telling me:
    “Let the tool do the Work!” and another one was “You would take a long time ploughing a field with just a knife and fork, but great fun trying!”
    Remember the toothbrush, cleaning the floor in call-up days? Na’ you are too young.
    Great post though, brought a smile to my face this afternoon.

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    1. The children think the video is a scream although I don’t expect it to appeal to anyone else Alan, it did use a whole rubber tip but there you go.

      The other day I went to use a rubber and found it had got dirty in my pencil case then I read your post, so as well as ordering two new propelling rubbers I ordered the cheapest electric one on ebay.

      Delete
  2. A little tip that I have learnt from somewhere Michael, can’t remember where. I carry my pencils in a homemade real leather case, not very big or grand, they used to sell off cuts of leather in King Street a couple of doors up from the Odeon (that was) but I’m sure you can find a bit somewhere, an old leather belt cut up to fit in your pocket.
    Why? The wrong side of the leather cleans up rubbers as if they were new!

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    1. Thanks for that Alan, you can see from the photo what has happened.

      Delete
  3. The other day a client gave me a "Frixion pen" (see e.g. http://www.cultpens.com/acatalog/Pilot-Frixion-Pens.html) -- it's quite like a pencil & rubber (i.e. unlike a pen & erasing fluid, because you can write/drawn again over the top of what you've just rubbed out). The drawback is that it hides what you've deleted by raising the temperature; so putting the paper in a freezer will apparently bring back the lost message/art -- I've not tested that yet.

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    1. Orazu it wouldn’t really be the putting it in the freezer – something I only do with paper to kill bookworm - it would be what happens when you start putting watercolour on to it that would be the acid test for

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.