October 2017

Here is the video that Dima made featuring the work we presented at the Chemistry Gallery on 13 October.[vimeo 238178858 w=640 h=360]
We had a great time at this event and in the video you will see that The New Tagtool app, as well as producing really smooth animation, enables the capture of drawings and photos, then storing them to use later – which is a great new feature for all Tagtool users! For the BYOB event, the images of bugs and flowers Dima prepared at home.  During the evening he took some video of the gallery and my ‘old-school’ drawing, and to make his  animated collage he took some photos of my work and our friend Ade, adding them to his deck of images, then drawing over and animating them. Result – this stunning kaleidoscope!

The music Dima chose for this video is Öngyilkos Vasárnap by Venetian Snares.

Inspired by the recent visit of Fernando Sica and Joseph Dorninger and their demonstrations of the great new features of the New Tagtool iPad app, we decided to take two projectors and our new iPad as well as my ‘old-school’ Tagtool to the BYOB event that was held at the Chemistry Gallery in Prague on Friday 13 October.

The photo above shows Dima sitting behind me using the iPad to make an animation on one wall of the gallery while I am standing at my ‘old-school’ Tagtool drawing on the upper part of the wall opposite. Using the new app, Dima had imported lots of photos of colourful bugs and beetles so I started to draw an exotic flower garden and hide some drawn creepy-crawlies among the foliage to complement his animation. Below – a still of Dima’s work. …and here are a couple of photos of my ‘flowers and bugs’ drawing.The event began at 8 pm and finished at 2 am – so this was a very long night of drawing for me. I did five different drawings during the course of the evening and in between I had an opportunity to go round, socialise and view other people’s work, which was nice. There were a lot of different installations and videos to watch as well as DJs and VJs playing all night – providing a lively accompaniment for my drawing as well as a great party atmosphere for the visitors! Below is my next drawing. Although a lot of people who came to the event were familiar with Tagtool, for some visitors it was the first time they had seen the ‘old-school’ machine. I made the image below to show a range of different drawing techniques – using the transparency and fading sliders, as well as opaque colour. But Dima judged these big heads as being a bit too depressing for this BYOB celebration party so I decided to start a new drawing and return to his flowers and bugs theme……but this time I hid a black rat in the leaves as well, just for fun! I ended the evening by drawing an urban landscape – which gave another opportunity to demonstrate the range of mark-making that is possible with the ‘old-school’ Tagtool……while Dima showed some of the animation moves with the Tagtool iPad app to visitors.We had a lot of fun at this most enjoyable event – and it was a great location for drawing too! Dima took lots of video of our work during the course of the evening and I will put this in a separate posting tomorrow.

On 3 October after we attended the opening of the sculpture exhibition at Bubny train station in Prague, Dima set up the projector and two iPads in the ticket hall.This photo by Fernando Sica shows the final image from our  muptiplayer session. It was great to have this opportunity to jam with Tagtool maestro Fernando Sica and Tagtool co-author Joseph Dorninger and I learned a lot from them about how to use the new features of this latest version of the iPad Tagtool.  In addition to all the nice animation moves, it’s great to be able to save photographic and drawn content, then import it during a session –  and this is something I will definitely think of using in the future!

On Friday 15 September at the Baroque Zamek Ohrada (below)  we did a Tagtool drawing performance as part of the events marking the 150 year anniversary of the establishment of the hunting museum in the castle.Because the current special exhibition at the museum is about forest management and shows the traditional methods of transportation of timber along the Vltava river I decided to  represent this theme in my drawing. The many windows, dark paintwork and arched portico presented quite a challenge for drawing, so we did some tests the week before using our own projector. As the photo below shows, it was clear immediately that 6000 lumens would not be powerful enough…… but for the event itself we were able to hire an 11000 lumens projector from Lunchmeat, which made all the difference. I began with this shadowy landscape……being careful to position the river so that it covered the balcony over the entrance to the building. Then I added the trees and drew the log raft over the entrance portico. Then when I started to add the three figures (below) I was able to draw them on the sections of flat wall between the windows above the balcony, so that the spectators who did not have a direct view of my drawing would see them without a lot of distortion.I will end this post with a big thank you to Lunchmeat for the use of their lovely, but enormous and heavy, Epson projector – which was so big that we had to position it on the roof of our van behind my Tagtool workstation! Even when I started to fade my drawing to end the projection, instead of becoming ghostly shadows, the figures remained brilliant to the very last minute of the performance.