Tag Archives: Models

Tiny trees

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White Tree Copse, mixed media model, digital photograph, 2020

I’ve made model trees for a table top forest before and I’ve returned to the idea recently as a starting point for making some new paintings.

Over the last few years I’ve made various model trees; 2D trees, 3D trees made from wire and clay, as well as carved wooden trees that I bought from a shop and painted. Sometimes they were for a specific purpose, such as the touring production of Hansel and Gretel I worked on in 2018 (Goldfield Productions, Directed by Clive Hicks-Jenkins) Words by Simon Armitage, Music by Matthew Kaner, puppets by Jan Zalud). And sometimes I just made them for the fun of it; I find there’s something particularly satisfying about making these tiny worlds. There’s definitely a nostalgic tang of childhood fantasy about it, remembering those hours, that seemed endless back then, of creating alien worlds, castles, moon cities, underwater kingdoms, magical realms; places that could be anything I imagined and that could exist outside all the established laws of the mundane world. In a word, I suppose it could be called ‘play’.

Even now, as a 55 year old man, I still get a thrill out of creating these places, and play seems as important as ever in these increasingly fractured, strained and anxious times.

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Mixed medial model, digital photograph, 2016

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Preparatory work for a touring stage production of Hansel and Gretel, mixed media, digital photograph, 2017

The trees I’ve made this week are 2D, painted in gouache onto thick paper, cut out and arranged in a 3D space with a sky painted onto card placed behind them. The trees and the photos are quite rough and ready as I’m using them to sketch out ideas for paintings but I do like them as objects in their own right too and I really enjoy seeing how they can transform during the process of lighting and photographing them. I use some simple photo-editing apps to adjust the photos but no sophisticated Photoshop stuff (I don’t know how) .

This time around i’m planning to use the resulting photos as jumping off points for some new paintings. I’ve not really done this to any extent before so i’m curious to see what happens. I want to try and avoid simply transferring the photographs into a painted image, I hope I can take things a step and create something more interesting by moving things into a different medium – we’ll see!

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The Dark Copse, mixed media model, digital photograph, 2020

Threshold

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Threshold, mixed media, 2020

I’ve been enjoying getting back into making some 3D work recently. Over the last couple of weeks i’ve made a couple of green man masks and yesterday I started playing about with some plaster that had been sitting on my shelf for ages. I’ve never used it before but i’d always liked the dry, crumbly texture of the material.

I started this piece by making a mould out of card and then adding the wet plaster. I had thought of trying a simple shape first to see what happened and the mould was very quick and easy to make. I wanted a rough, weathered texture so I didn’t have to worry about things being clean and precise!

As with a lot of my work, the process started with a small thumbnail in my sketchbook:

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The sketch included some sort of vines growing out of the stonework. As the piece developed, though, I decided to keep things very spare on this version (although i’ll probably make another version with the foliage at a later date). During the day I got a message with some very sad news about an old school friend and so my mood shifted during the course of the afternoon and this fed into how the work developed. In the end, it became rather melancholy and elegiac.

I painted the plaster plain white, and placed it in an empty landscape, with a painted sky backdrop somewhere between twilight and night. I was very happy with how the plaster took the texture of the mould and how easy it was to then work into it more, once out of the mould.  It’s a very fragile medium but it’s also cheap, quick drying and easy to work with, which suits me 🙂

Here’s a detail of the piece again, and another image with different lighting:

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New adventures in mask making

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We’ve had a plain, clear plastic mask sitting on a shelf here for a while, left over from a photoshoot my husband did a couple of years ago. I’ve always thought to myself that i’d like to decorate it, and this week I finally got round to doing so.

What emerged was a sort of green man mask, with lots of lichen, fungi and moss sprouting from the face. I’ve never made a mask before, but I thoroughly enjoyed doing this, it was just so satisfying making something by hand and making a 3D object.

I feel like i’ve got the bug and that i’ll make some more of these, maybe trying different approaches and techniques.

Here are a few snaps of the process; first covering the thin plastic mask in canvas strips coated in plaster, plus some of the elements to be fixed onto the mask, made from clay and paper:

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The next phase, layering paper onto the mask and sticking on the various elements i’d made out of clay, paper and wire:

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Then, with the making finished, I started the painting; fairly monochrome at first:

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And then, finally adding a bit of extra texture and some colour. I actually liked the monochrome, but I had an idea in my mind of how I wanted it to look so I tried the colour I thought might work:

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I’m pleased with the resulting effect, although I think i’d like to distort and change the structure of the face to be more expressive if I make any more. I do like the textures though 🙂

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Hansel and Gretel is coming!

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A first peek into the world of the new Hansel and Gretel stage adaptation touring soon –

 

The production is a dark reimagining of the traditional folk tale, premiering soon at the Cheltenham Music Festival on July 7th before touring the following venues:

  • Cheltenham Festival WORLD PREMIERE, 7th July
  • Lichfield Festival ‘book at bedtime’, Lichfield Guildhall, 13th July
  • Lichfield Festival matinee, Garrick Theatre, 14th July
  • Three Choirs Festival, Tomkins Theatre, 29th July
  • Oxford Contemporary Music, St Barnabas Church, 14th September
  • Jack Lyons Concert Hall, York, 3rd October
  • Barbican Milton Court Concert Hall LONDON PREMIERE, 12th October
  • Canterbury Festival,  Colyer-Fergusson Concert Hall ,21st October
  • Bath Spa University, Michael Tippett Centre,  24th October
  • Letchworth, Broadway Theatre,  4th November
  • Cambridge Music Festival, 24th November 2018

I’ve made table top models for the production, as well as images and animations to be projected onto a screen on stage, working with an extraordinary bunch of creative talents. Here’s a link to the Goldfield Ensemble webpage with details of everyone involved.

 

It’s been a tremendous pleasure and the resulting performances will be magical; come and experience it if you can!

 

 

Forest in a suitcase

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Just before I pack my mini forest into a suitcase to take to Wales on Thursday for filming there was time for one more spooky snap tonight, with a ’20s German Expressionist film version above, and a lurid ’70s horror film version below:

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The models will be set up on a table top for filming sequences that will go into a trailer for the new picture-book version of Hansel and Gretel by Clive Hicks-Jenkins which will be published by Random Spectacular in November. With Halloween not far away it’s the perfect time for some spookiness!

Im Wald 2

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Im Wald or In the forest, but as I’m in Germany at the moment, and i’m gearing up to some filming for a Hansel and Gretel book trailer next week with artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins and filmmaker Peter Telfer I thought i’d make the effort with a bit of Deutsche. Just trying out some snaps trying to get the feel of twilight on the edge of the forest, of the encroaching darkness that envelops the trees once the sun goes down and the first flutter of panic when you realise you’re lost, it’s getting dark and the only sign of habitation is a decidedly creepy looking cottage…

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And back in the UK some new trees emerging, plus a new cottage as the original ‘witch’s cottage’ is now firmly ensconced in its new home inside one of the bell jars so not much use for filming!

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Here in Berlin we often get out of town to go cycling in the big beech and pine forests that cover much of the countryside in this part of Germany. The forest certainly get me in the mood for this project, it goes a bit Blair Witch out in these woods sometimes!

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Back to the woods

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Now that Semblance is over and done it’s back to some dark forest-themed work this week. At the end of this month I’m collaborating with artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins and filmmaker Peter Telfer on a trailer for Clive’s new picture-book version of Hansel and Gretel for Random Spectacular, due out in November. You can see a great post on the evolution of this book on Clive’s Artlog here.

The short film will use footage of the models, intercut with puppet stop-motion sequences. Clive has described the aesthetic as “a kind of Svankmajer’s ‘Alice’/Dr. Caligari mash-up, additionally referencing…schlocky ‘horror movie’ trailers”, i.e. an absolute dream to work on!

I made a witch’s cottage model last year which will be travelling to Wales at the end of September, along with a suitcase packed up with gnarled trees, expressionist skies and cans of glow-in-the-dark spray. I think when I was little this would have been exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do when I ‘grew up’. So this week I’m experimenting with different lightings and moods, colour casts and backdrops…

 

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And here are a few snaps of the Semblance show which came up and went down in the blink of an eye it seemed. Me, Phil Gomm and Phil Hosking had a blast putting this exhibition together over the summer and when we finally got all the work up on the walls I think we all felt very pleased with what we’d achieved.

 

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We had a lot of people through the door, a lot of positive feedback about the show, and we all had some sales. It was a tad melancholy as we took the work down last week, though; it’s been like going on an adventure together this summer. But one of the many good things about showing at the Horsebridge is that you can walk round the corner, sit on the beach and watch the sun go down with a beer in hand which always lifts the spirits. So that’s exactly what we did after we packed up the work, swept the floor and turned the lights off as we left…

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Model characters

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Putting some of these models in bell jars and they change; they start to take on different characters and I’m imagining conversations going on (I must get out more).

Still got some work to do on these; I need to add a bit of ‘ground’ to the cottage and do the same to the arch. I’ve got to paint the arch too although I do really like the random newsprint finish it has at the moment.

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The two nicer jars here, with the cottage and the arch inside, were gifts from friends, so a big thank you to them, I’m enjoying working with these very much!