Needle felting is a technique where raw wool fibers are teased together using a special barbed needle. After a while the fibers tangle into a solid mass and form felt. By starting with a basic wad of wool and applying the needle in some areas more than others you can make interesting sculptural shapes.
These three fellows are my first attempts at the process.
The original goal here was to draw Harry Truman, but as you can see, the likeness got lost along the way.
Here at the Umbrella we offer a full range of amenities and benefits for our hard working minions.
For whatever reason I’ve been thinking about portraits today. I think these two would be a perfect pair for a buddy cop movie.
A little experiment with scratchboard and 2 ink colors.
I’m not sure exactly what this is, or really which direction is up. Yes, those are white scotty dogs, and yes, white scotty dogs do come from bean pods.
After some frustrations with the acrylics, I decided to get out the watercolors today and play a little bit in my sketchbook.
10 points if you can guess what these objects have in common.
Look out, he’s got a sharpie!
I’ve been practicing my portraiture lately, and in the process of trying out a few different styles I started thinking about the iconic portraits of CEO’s and celebrities they use in the Wall Street Journal. The Journal quite famously eschews the use of any photographs in its stories, though this has been changing in recent years.
As an alternative to photography, illustrator Kevin Sprouls approached the editors with the concept of stipple portraits, which resemble both engravings and the stippled halftone portraits that were common in newspapers before photography became the norm. Since then these ‘hedcuts’ as they’re called (note the spelling) have become a trademark of the Journal.
Although originally developed by Sprouls, there are now a number of artists generating these portraits for the Journal (between 4 and 6 depending on which article you read). Though I haven’t been able to track them all down, the following artists are well known participants.
Sprouls’ style has become so iconic that the National Portrait Gallery here in the U.S. now houses a collection of original portraits donated by the Journal, and provides a web gallery discussing the topic with examples and information.
One thing the NPG’s web site notes is that the guidelines developed for this technique allow the Journal to homogenize the work of multiple artists into a uniform look. Indeed I think that many people assume that the process is mechanical. However if you look carefully at the portraits, you can see small differences. Glass for example always surrounds his portraits with a thick outer contour.
The belief that these portraits are simply a Photoshop filter of some sort is underscored by the large number of people posting to related forums looking for advice on how to reproduce it. Though an ersatz copy, one of the best tutorials I’ve seen is this technique (though the author incorrectly conflates this technique with the woodcut style of illustrations on O’Reilly books). You’ll also see people using scan-line filters to give a similar, and fare more pleasing effect. NPR is currently using this technique for the portraits of its bloggers, for example on the Blog of the Nation (see the right sidebar).
If, like me, your more interested in the pen and paper techniques, the Dow Jones Company (The Journal’s parent) provides a PDF which explains the process. Best of all, the resolution is outstanding, so you can get a close look at the stippling. Above is my first attempt.
This last spring I had the chance to study lettering and font design with Josh Scruggs, graphic/font/web designer and all around talented article. Josh keeps a blog called 26Symbols, and recently asked if I could make a guest post about my adventures learning font design. While you’re there, check out Josh’s fantastic lettering work. He does that BY HAND. I’ve seen him do it.
One of my favorite things about going to art school is being exposed to techniques I would never otherwise know how to approach. A perfect example is bookmaking. About two years ago, a project for our two-dimensional design class was to create a book. At the time, we learned about the different parts of the book, how to make a clothbound cover, and a number of different binding techniques. In the end I designed my project after the large folio envelopes they use in our art library to collect loose leaf artwork, and so at the time I didn’t get a chance to try out any of the binding techniques, but it’s something that’s been on my mind for a while.
With some time this summer, I decided I’d give the project another go. As a gift, I wanted to make a writing journal, and so I did a little research to find out what sort of binding might be best. I wanted something that would allow the pages of the book to lie flat so it would be easy to write or draw on them, like the spiral binding of the sketchbook, but also something that would look a little more elegant. I finally settled on a version of Coptic binding. Here you can see the results.
This being a writing journal, I found some appropriate fabric, and made the covers by wrapping two pieces of chipboard cut to size. The inner covers are treated with some simple patterned paper to give a finished edge to the fabric wrap. There are actually two sets of binding stitches here. The first is a basic Coptic stitch which runs through the two outermost holes and the center hole. For this I used some basic bookbinding thread. The second binding is a two needle affair, and runs in two sets, one above and one below the center hole.
There are quite a few tutorials of simple Coptic stitching on the internet, but the more complex two-needle work was harder to come by. The best resource I found was a series of books by Keith Smith on Non-Adhesive Book Binding.
Now that I’ve had a little practice with this technique, I’m eager to try it again. When complete the book lays very flat, and is easy to write in, so I think this may be a great candidate for a homemade sketchbook.
