Lothar Meggendorfer's International Circus

       So, it has been a while and I thought I should come back to this blog with something truly beautiful and amazing! I was gifted this pop up book by a family friend who is a self confessed hoarder of amazing things. Since she knows I love the circus this was the perfect present for me. 
       The book she gave me is a reproduction pop up book which was printed in 1979, the original production of this book was printed in 1887! The book is a panoramic scene, the "book" folds out to create a circus tent with a different act in each section. The Frankfurter Journal reviewed the book in 1887 calling it:

"the most spectacular of Meggendorfer's surprises... a book that is certain to astound and delight everyone"

  

In the year we are celebrating 250 years of circus, it is great to go back and look at images of the original circus with it's classic big top. 

The below images show some of the amazing and humorous illustration, with captions from the book. Enjoy! 

"Miss Ella rides her stately horse while the clowns have trouble riding their Donkey."

"Mr Funtolo performs on his horse as he leaps over a flaming gate."

"The Bravo family show their graceful skill riding bareback on two horses"

"The sultans courier straddles his galloping horses"

"Clara Springel leaps and somersaults through a hoop"

 

Life Drawing in Bristol

      I have recently changed jobs which means I have a lot more evenings free and I have used this time to try and make the most of living in Bristol and trying out new things! The last time I did any life drawing was in my second year of university 4 years ago and even normal drawing I am very out of practise. 

      I found that there were circus themed life drawing sessions at The Island in the city centre where they have a circus training space. As someone who takes aerial circus classes already I was really excited to try this and me and my friend Holly decided to go and flex our slightly underused drawing muscles.

      We went to two of the three sessions, each started with fairly short poses using rope, silks or trapeze. I was intrigued to see what types of poses we would do knowing that even posing for photos on circus equipment hurts a lot as there are many narrow pressure points and uncomfortable grips. I liked the way the models wrapped the equipment around them and used it to create interesting wraps and shapes for us to draw. 

      These sessions were untutored, which was nice because I am very out of practise, everyone just got on with their own thing. People were using all different materials, some just with sketchbooks some with large sheets of paper. There was no pressure with people walking around looking at your work it just felt nice to make marks and shapes and not worry about if something worked or not. 

      The people who ran the circus classes also have a regular spot at Cafe Kino on Gloucester road on a Monday evening. This week we decided to check it out.

We had two models, the one at the start was pregnant which was really interesting and beautiful to draw. I tend to prefer drawing women because they have such fabulous curves (sorry men).

      This session was a little different from the circus ones because we were able to draw longer poses, the two below were 20 and 40 minutes which gave a little more time to focus on adding more detail and working on the shapes. I will forever hate drawing hands, feet and faces, but maybe if I go to a few more sessions this will improve over time. 

      If you want to try out the monday life drawing sessions you can follow their facebook page here. It runs 6-8pm and costs £5 for the two hours with some basic materials available if you don't have your own. The circus sessions may be running again soon if you just keep an eye on their facebook page.

Wacom Intuos Playtime

After finding out I have been overpaying my tax all year (soon to be resolved yay!) I decided to treat myself to something new. I have been meaning to buy a Wacom tablet since my final year of university when it was recommended by my course tutor. I finally got around to purchasing this Intuos Pen & Touch Tablet and decided to have a play with it. 

I started off by watching a large chunk of a "Wacom essential training" course on lynda.com, it is a subsciption site, but totally worth it if you want to learn new skills on all things design based! From this course I learnt about the history of tablets and how they work, and also how to set up useful shortcuts on the pen and tablet buttons so they work differently in different applications (through system preferences on a mac). 

I set up my desk with the tablet to the right of my mac, the hope is that when I move house I can get a bigger desk and have a better set up with a wireless mouse and keyboard and the tablet in front of the mac! I started just playing around with colours and different types of line, drawing font seems to work quite well as you get a really smooth line. 

Still in need of some practise I think.

While I didn't come up with anything super impressive it was good to just have a play and try out some things to get a feel for the tablet. I will likely use it mostly for colouring scanned in line-work rather than digital painting but I think using it for hand rendered type is definitely something I want to try more of. 

What is your experience of Wacom tablets? Anyone have any tips?

Start Something New

It is the start of a new year and the time where most people are assessing their situations and making various resolutions and plans for the year ahead. Whilst for many people this involves keeping fit and eating well, apple has come up with a different spin on it, which I really quite like.

They have a new promotional campaign for the new year which is called "start something new" the focus of this is creating art using apple products. Whether that is through inbuilt software and applications, or through third party apps which utilise the touch screens and cameras in iphones and ipads. They showcase a number of different pieces of work on their website here, naming the artists and the tools that they have used. 

I love the idea of this, whether you are using apple products or not I think it is a great time of year to start new projects. I decided to give my desk a good clear out and tidy up so that I could get doodling. 

Now anyone who might follow my instagram feed probably knows that I have been taking aerial classes in Bristol for just over a year now. After my final project at university focusing on circus, I had always dreamed of trying out aerial skills, and now I have gotten to a point where I am really happy with the many tricks I know. 

Today I had a really great training session, I have been trying to build up my calloused hands and pain resistance after a 2 week break over christmas and today I feel like I achieved a lot. 

I haven't drawn any people for a little while so I decided this was a good excuse to get some practise in. My rotring pens are unfortunately a little sad and dried up so I decided to play around with a glass dip pen I bought last year, the nib gives quite a thick line but there is a really nice flow to it which I like the feel of.

Desk all set up.

I don't think my people will ever have faces, especially using this thick a line!

I really like these cheap zebra mechanical pencils for sketching out lines and shapes to build on. 

Hopefully will do a few more of these and colour up the good ones, does anyone else have any design/drawing resolutions they fancy sharing? 

HOT14 Plymouth Illustration Show

I took a trip down to Plymouth last week to catch up with some uni friends and check out this years degree show. It was interesting to go back and see the work all the third years have been making to motivate myself to start something new. I am currently in the process of moving house which is taking up a lot of time and thinking space but I have a nice little dresser in my new room which I will be turning into a desk I hope :)

I find it interesting going to these shows because there is such a wide variety of drawing styles and themes. I chose my course because they encourage you to follow the style you work most comfortably in, rather than getting you to try what they like and criticising your work otherwise (which I have heard from some people). I have linked to the people whose work I recognise, comment if yours is here and you would like me to put a credit under!

Sammy Arnault-Ham

Lydia Coventry

Lucy Feebs - wish I could bend like these awesome ladies

Ross Ingliewicz (one of my favourites!)

Hope you liked these, over the next couple of weeks I will be bringing you some pictures of the product design and photography work to continue this series - let me know what you think of these!