I'm exploring the meeting points between old and new technologies. I make cyanotype prints of remote photo shoots and typewriter portraits of poses captured on video calls. I use plotters and disposable ball pens to capture dynamic poses, laser cutters to carve jigsaws designed using the oldest and cheapest possible tech, and spreadsheets (oh so many spreadsheets), to create unique single line portraits on a grandiose scale where the pen never leaves the page for twelve hours or more. Oh, and I also like a touch of pencil and charcoal life drawing.
Wave to the Queen
A plotted portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. This is a single line, which starts at the top left corner and ends in the lower left.
Kneeling
A three-layer mosaic of a male athlete, kneeling on a gym mat. Sections of the various layers were masked to allow lower layers to show through.
Bubbles
An A1 drawing of a male model, drawn using eight Bic Biro pens. There are roughly 20,000 circles in the complete picture, with some black circles overlaying the coloured circles to darken the image.
Anthony
Two charcoal, chalk and pastel drawings of Anthony. Each is A2 and the poses were held for 10 and 25 minutes respectively.
Mo-mo-Mona
Mosaic of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Mona Lisa. COpen the full post for a close-up of the face.
Girl with a Pearl
Mosaic of Vermeer’s picture of Girl with a Pearl Earring, printed on A3 paper. The full post includes a close-up of the face.
Hoodie
Plotted picture of Graham wearing a hoodie but no trousers. This was plotted using four Bic Biro pens with separate layers for the yellow, magenta, cyan, and black inks. The picture only contains straight vertical lines.
Spacewalk
Mosaic of astronaut Bruce McCandless II performing a spacewalk (extra vehicular activity, or EVA) in February 1984 as fart of the Space Shuttle mission STS-11. The original photo was taken by NASA. The mosaic is made using my own algorithms, which are used to create tiles of three different sizes, which are then selectively masked by hand. All work is done on Linux using my own code at the Terminal, with finishing touches applied in GIMP.
Samuel mosaic
Mosaic photography of Samuel, who posed remotely. The image is composed of three mosaics with low- medium and high definition tiles sliced and reassembled using my own algorithm.
Lee in lines
An A3 picture of Lee. I plotted this image using three Bic Biros – one cyan, one magenta, and one yellow – having first split the image down into those three colour channels.
Bum bags gallery 2
A second gallery of male buttocks printed onto teabags using the cyanotype process. As with the first collection, apologies to American viewers, to whom ‘bum bags’ are better known as ‘fanny packs’.
Kramer in the woods
Kramer posed for me remotely. I was at home in the UK and he was at home in California, where he ventured out to pose in the surrounding woodland. This is an A5 cyanotype from the session.
Bum bags gallery 1
A gallery of five sets of buttocks printed on teabags using cyanotype processes. The pun ‘bum bags’ was too good to pass up, even though it may be lost on American viewers who call bum bags fanny packs.
Kevin
A portrait of Kevin, drawn as a single line passing through 2280 spirals. I’ve actually plotted this one twice here, using a light blue Bic biro for the background and a regular dark blue Bic for the main image.
Bathroom
Most of my jigsaws are the same pose, reversed. In this instance, I’ve used two separate images taken in the same location, again with pieces swapped between the two to censor the original shots.
Seaton in Hull
Seaton’s pose was the perfect shape to fit this bend in the River Humber. A cyanotype print on a cut up section of an old map
Seaton sketch
Stripped-back sketch of a nude male model. This was created using two Bic Biros – one red, one black – on a plotter, using A3 paper.