Using a Wacom pad

Pedro recently bought a Wacom graphics tablet and has started making prints with it.

For anyone who not familiar with graphics tools and applications a Wacom tablet is a digital pad which connects to a computer and allows the userto draw directly onto it.

I like them very much - the prints have the look of traditional lithographs. He’s promised to make some more and they will appear on the site early next year

Exhibition of Artists' Books

We’ve been thinking about possibly doing artists books on the site and it was interesting to visit an exhibition at the Rocket Gallery, which is part of the Tea Building in Shoreditch, titled ‘Book a Table’ which was a group exhibition showing coffee tables by contemporary designers along with artists' books. I was particularly interested in looking at the books by Julian Opie, Sol Lewitt and Ib Geertsen. Some beautiful tables too, I particularly liked the solid oak stacking tables by Tomoko Azumi and David Restorick’s sportscar-yellow coffee table.
It was an interesting exhibition partly for the range of approaches taken as well as some of the very impressive work.

Lambeth Open Studios

In October we took part in the Lambeth Open Studios event. Our studio at Railton Road was nicely tidied up (quite an achievement in itself), we put our work up on the walls and Lyn made some cakes for everyone.

To be honest we weren’t expecting a lot of people to be interested enough to come along but in the event we had well over 100 people visit over the two days, which was pretty good.

The showing round duties were split between myself and Pedro and we found a lot of people were interested to know more about the technique of Giclée printmaking and were impressed by the vivid colours possible and by the quality of the Somerset Enhanced paper we use to print on (which looks like any normal ‘art’ paper). We had a lot of visits from other artists who were interested in getting into Giclée themselves, and several who asked about us outputting their work on our printer.

All in all, a worthwhile exercise, but a lot of work and very hard on your voice - I felt like I’d been talking non-stop for two days. A big thank you to all the people who came along and for all the interest in our work.

Ian and myself spent the weekend of 18-19th July at Urban Art 2009, Brixton. We were very pleased with how the work looked up, and people's reaction to it. The Saturday went very well, lots of people walking by, however our poor position at the end of the street resulted in a very lonesome Sunday afternoon. Threatening rain didn't help the situation, we spent a lot of time wrestling with plastic sheeting to protect the prints. All in all a good weekend, a few sales, good coffee and cakes and some interesting people to talk too.

Urban Art

The urban art weekend isn't far off now, so we're up to our ears with getting the prints framed up and ready, and organising plastic sheeting etc in case it rains. Hopefully it won't happen but (as Chuck Berry once said) you never can tell.

Hopefully we'll sell stuff but, failing that, it'd be good to generate some interest and visits to the web site.

Another thing we've started to use recently is Google adwords which is generating traffic through the site, even though it's only cost us about a tenner so far. It sure beats the web windows ad we took in the Independant a few months back which cost £250.00 and generated exactly zero hits.

We are beginning to think about how we can show our prints to their best advantage at Urban Art 2009, its going to be a challenge. I think we might have to have a dress rehearsal before the weekend arrives. Lets hope it doesn't rain...

Ian and Peter went along to Josephine Avenue to look at our 'pitch. The yellow lines are our boundaries...

The posters have arrived for Urban Art 2009. They are certainly eye catching.