Teignmouth

Lonely

Coast

Red Rock Cafe

Back the the Postcards

I'm currently going back to an original idea of postcards. Postcards symbolising the landmarks of my journey between Exeter St Davids and Teignmouth. They're my own landmarks not perfect photos of iconic scenes from the towns but stills form my videos that I would recognise anywhere.

Amusements

Fails of Prints

So I seem to have been on a roll lately with failing when it comes to silkscreen printing. I've either been using too strong ink or there's been something wrong with the acetate, who knows! But I'm taking 2 unsuccessful weeks as a sign to not print bigger and stick to what I no and stay smaller.

The annoying thing is that I have the next 4 images to print for a reason. The idea of printing the 'Landmarks' of this journey, making a link to the Railway Posters that started this project for me. Showing progression of my skills a s a printer also, I'm going to keep on printing of course but just may have to think up a new tack to keep the images interesting.

Take one

Take two

The first of hopefully quite a few.

Of course this isn't an original poster or anything close but a full size poster advertising a city that's important to me for £4.95? Sold! From the London Transport Museum gift shop.

I'd like to start collecting some poster for myself after spending so many months looking at them through a screen, but not to go over board only posters showing a city or town that means something to me, somewhere that's familiar. The coastline of Devon and Cornwall it is then! I shall forever be on the hunt for a Dawlish Poster! 

Landmarks

With the 1940s posters the images in those posters are landmarks symbolising the city, with that in mind I've looked back through all the Dawlish footage I've got and realised that there are places I see on this journey, specifically on the railway route that are significant to me, and that when I look at these images each of them are a landmark of that point of the journey to me.

Red Rock Cafe

Dawlish Coast

Teignmouth

Along with the image of Dawlish amusements park from my last post I'm now thinking that these four images are going to be my next four prints. But they're not just more Dawlish photos, I'm not just cheating and still using the footage I took months ago because these stills are taken from the second Dawlish trip I took and fortunately it was a much brighter day when I took this video comparing to the very grey collection of images I've created from my first trip.

So I've enhanced these images, so only making more of what's already there, especially the blue sky, the Red in the Red Rock Cafe sign, the green of the grass under the Teignmouth sign, to mostly emphasize the difference between these images and the last. I've made these images more bright, more bold and because of this they are slightly more poster like, but still realistic.
So I think that these will make another collection of their own in a way because they are more bright, I'm using brighter ink now also so that'll enhance them along with using different acetate which creates a more bold colour.

Dawlish Amusement Park.

When I started this project I was looking at railway posters from the 1940s that advertised cities and towns around the UK. I sort of moved off this topic when I got going with my own prints but whenever I've looked back through my research the main bulk of it has been these posters and the artists that created them.

I've moved on from the idea of creating my own posters because that's not what my works about any more but while enhancing my images on photo shop by the simple click of the button 'posterize' it gathers the bulk colour together and creates the image that those posters had, and I really like this effect. 

Dawlish Amusements Posterized

It's interesting to contrast it to the original image because there's not that much difference, it's only the effect of having bulk colours instead of the shadows and shading. 

Dawlish Amusements

Yet because of these slight differences when I look at the posterized image I instantly see the 1940s posters and think that if I have time before the end of the year it could be fun to CMYK it and see if the colours are as clear when silk screen printed.

Stopping off at Dawlish

This is hopefully that first and last time I may appear to look like a train spotter. Once again it's not about the train (ish) as it's not about the type of train going past just the fact that I'm usually on the train going through this sight so really this video is sort of my work but in reverse.

I prefer getting photos from the videos I take rather than just taking a photo, because if I got out of the train to start photographing these sights then it becomes more about me being a photographer which I'm not, if anything I've become a printmaker now in art but only printing shots from a video.

So I don't intend to take any stills from this to then print, I just found it interesting seeing the sight of Dawlish in a different way, a different angle, and I couldn't help but to record it.

All things Disney!

My blog for Creative Project this year!
http://bradley-in-wonderland.blogspot.com/

Prints 4 and 5

Paying my full attention to printing the past few weeks I now feel that my prints are getting better and better, next to perfect in being lined up and getting brighter after increasing the amount of acrylic compared to mixer I'm using for the prints.

River Start

It appears that I've been working backwards, the first print that I did 'Splash' will actually be the last in the series and this most recent print with Exeter Cathedral in the background will be the first. These five prints now show the journey of leaving Exeter St Davids Station through to going through the tunnels of Dawlish, and the train being splashed with the rocky waves breaking over the walls that protect this stretch of the railway.
As I've been moving on with each print I've been experimenting with different amounts of acrylic seeing what ratio creates a better print and I've come to the conclusion that using 33% is much more effective (while not being too much) compared to 25% that I originally used on Splash.

Cathedral 

Now that I've got my five prints of the 'Dawlish' Journey I now need to decide what to do next, start with a completely new journey altogether? Keep going with this original footage? Or find a way to extend it, keep going on the same journey. Either way I need to go and get more footage, luckily I've got tickets booked to head home so I'll be getting the camera back out and looking completely normal filming the journey as I go with the camera looking like it's glued to the window, with my hand also trying to keep the whole thing steady.

Happy Mistakes

Once again I appear to have created an error when printing. However unlike last time it didn't ruin the whole 5 prints I was doing that day, only one of them I messed up by now paying attention to lining them up fully, so once again I decided to keep on going and just see what the print ends up looking like instead of wasting the piece of paper by giving up.

The next layer (yellow) then went upside, this was me completely not paying attention and printing when the paper was the wrong way round, however I quite like the end effect. Looking like a yellow sky on this image creates a completely different image, and only having the cyan and magenta layers at the bottom makes the once green grass appear to be a pond or a lake, so it's interesting when things going wrong could end in disaster creates a good image in itself.

Printing Error

When thinking you're on a roll things can often go wrong. Being distracted meant that I wasn't paying full attention to the forth print I was doing for this series meant I ended up printing magenta through the yellow part of the silkscreen so things ended up rather more pink than they were meant to.

Slightly more Magenta than there should be

I carried on thinking I've paid for the paper may as well keep going with the four layers and see what the print looks like in the end, and considering this was my first print where I was able to get some real colour onto the paper with the green bank in the foreground it wasn't too disastrous as I ended up making the yellow more strong to try and make up for the added amount of Magenta. If I was aiming for more abstract work then I could actually pretend that this is what I was aiming for but of course that's not what my work's about and just have to put this print aside as a trial and error and pay more attention next time!

Experimenting with just a Cyan and Black layer

Forgotten London Underground posters

Even though my project isn't exactly on the old railway posters from the 1930s and 40s any more they still catch my eye when I come across any that I haven't seen before. There's a wide section of the posters to view at the London Transport Museum which I'm hopefully going to see next month but until then I've already been able to have a sneak peak when the Telegraph had an article on posters advertising London and the Underground.

Underground for Business or Pleasure; by FE Witney, 1913

London Transport Museum in Covent Garden cares for one of the world's finest poster archives and includes images that are now over 100years old. Many of the designs featured were inspired by the creation of the modern graphic poster, which dates from the 1890s and revolutionised the advertising industry. The posters featured in this gallery span decades of the museum's collection and replicas are available to purchase at the museum or on-line. Until March 18th, the museum is also running the display Poster Parade - Painting by numbers which features a selection of statistics relating to the London Underground Tube network.

The first graphic posters were commissioned by Frank Pick, who was responsible for London Underground's publicity in 1908. Then as now, the Underground was primarily used by commuters but the works he authorised sought to promote the benefits of the transport network and provide London Underground with a more coherent corporate identity.

David St John Thomas

David St John Thomas is sort of a more modern Bradshaw, he's written several volumes of A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain, the one I'm interested in however is Volume 1 THE WEST COUNTRY.

His fifth revised version written in 1981 is just one of the many books I've been taking out of library's recently and I still love it when I find old paintings or photos of Dawlish of how it used to be, or how it still looks the same.

Water-colour by W.J.Dawson in 1848

There are of course only so many books with old photos of Dawlish and I am getting to the stage of seeing the same photos and drawings in different books now but one of is still this one I originally saw in David St John Thomas The Great Way West as it makes you wonder how it must have been to build this section of the south west railway.

An artists impression of the late 1840s from the
Illustrated London News

When I've been on a train home there's been several times the sea has splashed onto the train itself but never quite like in 1974 when this photo was made into a postcard to make travellers feel lucky when they went to Dawlish on a more pleasant day.

1974, the year that most of Dawlish's down platform was
missing having being destroyed in an exceptional gale.

South Devon Coast Path,

An imaginary Devon
setting by the artist
Vana Haggerty

In the past few weeks I've been researching journeys. Spending countless hours sat on the floors of book shops and library's going through books that aren't just about the trains themselves but that have photos of the places I'm familiar with and can relate to. I came across the book South Devon Coast Path by Brain Le Messurier and even though it's nothing to do with train journey's it's still telling you about a form of a journey only walking instead of on a train.

Flicking through I notice how the views of Dawlish are exactly the same as I see them as there's a walkway right along the railway, only these photo's below were taken over 30years ago in 1980.

The front at Dawlish.

Dawlish: It's sea wall railway was engineered by Brunel.

View from Langstone Rock, Looking towards Dawlish Warren.

Prints two and three

Now that I've learnt how to CMYK print I've thought I may as well keep going with it and theoretically my Prints should get better. With my first print I thought it ended up a bit too greeny, this may have been because the cyan was too strong so with my second print I added more magenta paint to mixer compared to the other three colours but annoyingly think all the prints became a bit too pink and also my levelling each layer was shocking, shows what happens when in a rush and trying to get things finished for an assessment.

Print 2: Rocks

So when it came to making up my third print I took the whole day to do it properly, and using the acetate to line up every single layer and I feel that it really shows. My third set of prints are a lot more lined up and clear and crisp and so because I was able to do this I'm defiantly going to do some more. 

Print 3: Rain

I think that a series of 5prints for the journey will be a good amount and so in the mean time I've been thinking of another journey I can record and then print. I can't think of doing another set of prints that aren't of the coastline, and another stretch of railway that is along the coast is when you change trains at St Erth for the branch ling to St Ives. I would love to print the classic shot of St Ives of the Harbour and multi coloured houses but if I remember correctly you can't see them when the train stops at the station at St Ives, but I'm half tempted to do a print of just a photo that I take, and you never know It could be nice for the sets of prints to end on a clean crisp shot showing that I've reached my destination perhaps?

Great British Railways

"In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain. His name was George Bradshaw, and his railway guides inspired the Victorians to take to the tracks. Stop by stop, he told them where to travel, what to see and where to stay. Now 170years later I'm making a series of journeys across the length and breadth of the country to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains." This is how Michael Portillo opens each and every episode of his series Great British Railway Journeys on BBC2.

George Bradshaw's hand book for rail travel.

In series one my mother recorded the episode when he stayed in Bath and since I've kept on watching onto the third series that's showing every week day on BBC 2. It's a show about the journey's you can take around Britain and Bradshaw writes about the things you shouldn't miss, things to see in every town you could go to by rail, and he's made me want to go to some places now purely from the 5minutes of him walking around them. I've love to watch the weeks of episodes when we went around Devon and Cornwall now because I wasn't paying as much attention to this show 2years ago as I am now, and I'd love to hear what he makes of the sight when a train passes through Dawlish. 

Opening credits shot of Portillo's series.