B is for Bookplates - 5 - Mine

Some of you will be pleased to learn this is the last of these . . . for now; we will return to them in the fullness of time, along with the previously mentioned book-marks, one of which, a novelty polymer one, came in with a mixed-lot this afternoon!

So having been introduced to bookplates at a young age; 6 or 7 maybe, and knowing Mum had one, I had a hankering for one as I began to accumulate books myself, in my teens, when I was also visiting Thomas Thorp's myself, as a customer, on my way to and from Art Collage!

 

And these sketches date from that time (1981-3), I was actually working on an/my graphic interpretation of Celtic artwork, quite the hippy! These were in part for a Tattoo I never actually got done! Something which ironically pleases me now, given that every other buggers' got them, they've rather lost their cache, in their commonality.

 

You can see there's a bit of 'Slimfont' work going on as well, and a simplified version of the dragon ended-up on my carved tile, might-be-Roman, coaster.

This is where it would lead about 15 years later, these are a few colour studies I did on some photocopies, in various sizes, with my treasured magic markers - long since dried-out. Colour really doesn't work on bookplates, I don't know why, but they almost demand to be left understated! If I had to use one in would be the browns on the right, I'm a sucker for Autumnal colours!

 

Working out the layout and lettering, clearly 'slimfont' wasn't far away once I'd gone with the circles or bubbles concept! And my middle initial 'D' was dropped as it was going to obscure the tail . . . yeah, it's an embryo!

 

The two scraps of paper top-centre look like they might be the margins of 'Model and Collectors Mart'! Long-gone now I think!

 

I don't know what I was doing here, the cut-outs are presumably because I thought about reversing the image (no computer still! '97-98?), while the larger image (actually the same size as both the cut-outs and the tracing) might have been half-an-idea for a sundial?

The little blue sketch may be the first version, but therein lies the problem with the whole design, I eschewed the designs which used the tracing of rights-free stuff, and commercial lettering, for something wholly my own work . . . for my own bookplate; makes sense, right?

But . . . one of the books I bought at Thorp's, back in the nineteen-eighties, was the English-language, full-colour version of Frenchman Philip Druillet's Lone Slone/Delirius, published by Dragon's Dream, and, on the large, double page spread of his lovemaking with some universal god-head's daughter/princess (or something, I can't check as it's in storage), there are a bunch of bubbles and planets and stuff at the top of the page/panel, including something looking suspiciously like this?

 

And there is issue; there is a child produced by the union, it is being conceived in the panel-image, so it is an embryo! Now it would be wrong of me to claim this is an original, if it's derivative of the master's work!

 

In my defence, at art collage you are taught to sketch anything you like, anything that takes your fancy, something which was only reinforced many years later when we had to visit museums and produce copious works of what we saw, while at university as a mature student. After all, the great architect Santiago Calatrava is known to have based his overhead rail gantries on a sketch of a bull's head!

Now when I was working on the bookplate, I was sure I was dealing with a funny little sketch of a planet or something, and while I decided it did indeed look like an alien embryo and, if developed along those lines, would have connections to the embryonic ideas that come out of reading &etc . . . I also have to face the fact that by subconscious accident or forgetful design, I probably ripped-off Mr. Druillet! Hay-ho, I'm stuck with it now and it's stuck into thousands of my books!

But it's only stuck into the art/architecture/design and collectables/modelling/wargaming libraries, so I may return to the old designs, or make a new one altogether, when I get the rest plated-up in the next few years.

 

Perhaps one of the Oriental ones (previous-but-one post) could be used for my late mother's library of oriental art, ceramics and persian carpets, with a new one (I have half an idea for one with a rabbit in the bottom left corner and a distant warren in the background, top-right) for the natural sciences? And I'll need one for the History/military books? I wouldn't use bookplates for fiction, I find it an ephemeral art!

Oh, and if you find this bookplate in either of Michael Maughan's 1st or 2nd volumes of the Timpo guide, the Great Book of Corgi OR any of the Hornby Companion series (landscape hardbacks), they are mine, and the person who has them - shouldn't have, I think some may be in Colorado, if not they are long gone as the other suspect (and there were only ever the two) is dead! But the books are still mine!

B is for Bookplates - 4 - Drafts

We arrive at my efforts! It took me a while to get round to doing a bookplate for myself, although there were half-hearted attempts at them when I was a teenager, those efforts are somewhere in the storage unit!

Here I've copied some stuff, a woman, and some graphics from Mecanorma and/or Lettraset catalogues, which I've enlarged, in order to better trace those elements I wanted to use/transfer to the draft design.

 

Now, I can't for the life of me remember how I arrived at these coloured copies of the lady, or where she came from? At that time I had no copier, no computer . . . and the corner shop's photocopier might have had an enlarge feature, but I don't remember it being a colour machine, nor do the Lettraset and Mecanorma (French equivalent of Lettraset) catalogues have any colour artwork, as far as I can remember?

 

These sketches will date from around 1997/8, and I just don't know how I had the ability to produce these working scraps, but clearly I did! And having done so, got to work on them . . .

 

. . . first by reversing the image, and again; how? No feature like that on a photocopier? No computer until 2007? How can one totally forget a whole process? I normally have a very good memory (it's one of the features of Asperger's), but this is all a blank!

 

Anyway, you can see how I was going to join the two girls hair together to make the outer frame of the design, while on the right I'm using tracing-paper to lift some of the dry-transfer elements and try to bring them together in a more unified structure, I've drawn some new hair in, having traced her without her hair.

But again adding to the mystery, the two girls in the left-hand image have had all their lines go A) very broad and sausage-like, and B) there's a negative, white-space, thing going-on where the lines cross . . . I do have a vague memory of that being a negative-feature of the enlarging process, maybe I had help producing the preliminary materials from the studio guys at the sign fitting company I was working at.

 

They had Adobe, I think, matched with CorelDraw? Probably running on Windows 95? If she's a rights-free piece of clip-art, it would have been easy for Jason or Matt to enlarge, reverse one, and print them off for me?

 

However, I seem to have lost interest in a naked, fantasy princess bookplate, quite quickly and moved on to something more oriental, again using tracing to take images from a rights-free, images portfolio, which I'd bought from the previously mentioned Thomas Thorpe's in Guildford, many years earlier while at art collage!

 

And yes, that's a typo, but it took me until I was today-year's-old to realise it is Mecanorma, not Mecanorama . . . classic word-blindness! Googling Mikado as a typeface leads to a kids-friendly 'chunky' design and a couple of bog-standard and rather boring sans-serif types, which wouldn't have interested me then or now.

But, I did find a seller on Etsy who has a few sheets of the Mecanorma original for sale, and you can see that the note (on the back of the design - you can just see it through the paper) was pointing to a nice oriental typeface for which to produce the 'Ex Libris' and/or any name.

 

Meanwhile, this design had also been taken to, if not a near finished stage, at least a stage where you could see what the final design would look like? It may even have come before the one above - it has a certain air of abandonment about it?

 

I guess I would have been looking for a bamboo effect letter type? And no; I have no idea what happened or was due to happen on the 22nd, nor indeed, which month, but again, 1997 is a safe bet, or 1998!

I may return to these and get them finished as commercial prospects in a year or two, these days there's plenty of places like evilBay and Etsy to shift this kind of bespoke stuff, and production costs have come right down with home-computing, desktop publishing and the like, and I think there's a ream of licky-sticky paper in my stuff somewhere, but it may be a solid brick by now!

F is for Fatabet - the Slimfont of Self-indulgence!

Yeah, there'll be a few of these going forwards too; it's my Blog! We’re back to early ideas of mine which were fleshed-out when I got stuck into CAD, but this one goes back to my childhood, or - at least - teenage flirtations with design, and my attempt at an alphabet or font I originally called 'Fatabet', pronounced fat-a-bet, for obvious reasons!

The pages of my old sketch-book from collage, back in 1981-3, and my attempts to design an alphabet in which all the letters were contained within a circle; I think there were a couple in the 1970's; Lettraset did one with smiley-faced suns I think, but despite having both Lettraset and Mechaorama catalogues, I didn't crib from them (if they come out of storage I'll compare the closest, but they may have been lost in a flood back in 2007?), and sort of gave-up when I couldn't solve a couple of letters, the 'B' was one and the 'D' which still niggles!

However, CAD was an obvious opportunity to have another stab at the old idea, and I quickly got some geometric rules established and started playing around with the harder letters and some punctuation. You can see that 'B' (and 'D') along with 'Q' are coming out of the circle and I'm still not 100% happy with the first 2, the 'Q' however works, as it's already an odd-one!

I quickly used it for my signature block on all my drawing files/print-outs, and started thinking about other treatments; most fonts have a bold and italic version, so in playing-around I've ended up with several potentials!

And yes, the Fatabet got renamed Slimfont, although I know I could never use Fatboyslim, or Slimshady commercially, or not without passing many pieces of silver to two guys who probably have enough already!

Slimshady actually gave me the ultimate version (see below), while I don't think I named the one bottom-left, which ought to be Slim Outline but I already used Slimout for the standard font, so maybe Slim Jazzy?

Here we see CAD'ed versions of Slimwall (greenish) and Fatboyslim (multicoloured), which - latter - gave me the idea for a Christmas card I think I posted here at the time - 2012? With a construction stage at bottom left, before I'd positioned the light-source for the shadows, and at bottom right, my prepared design doubled for printing on A3 card-stock.

Which is here again! Well, it's only about six weeks away now! You use a single 'light' so the lines from the shadows, followed-back through the letters, all go to a single vanishing-point to enhance the 3D effect of the letters floating over the 'card' on the card!

And no matter how bad the year's been I hope over the next few weeks, your Christmas this year shapes up to be better than the last two - it can't just keep getting worse . . . can it?

Some other stuff, even in the digital age, it seems a lot of paper still finds its way into the project folder, not all of it explainable, but clearly I've started tackling the numbers and looking at font-size or kerning (ratios of gaps between certain pairs of adjacent letters) or something!??

I don't think I ever progressed beyond the numerals you can see here (left) or have even got to choosing a final from some of those where there are alternatives shown, but I was doing it in college-time and had other stuff to get on with.

Once I had a near finished alphabet (right) I moved on to other things and haven't got much further, I tweak something from time to time, but time's short these days, although I hope one day to put a finished version on a free-site like DAFonts.

One change you may have noticed is that the parallel line 'rule' established by the original 'A' and 'B' from my teenage version, which was carried on with the 'C', 'E' and 'F' (still not happy with 'D'!) and then taken through the whole alphabet, has now been dropped for 'W' following the enforced  'angle rule' for 'X' and 'Y', which I think makes it much better, the 'W' isn't just an upside down 'M', but a new letter in its own right!

Indeed you wonder if the reason all those angled letters are all at the back-end of the alphabet ('Z' is another) might be because when they were codifying it (monks? a Caesar?), they'd run out of strait and curved shapes/combinations which were suitably different from each other!

But back to Slimshady . . . once I was 3D CAD'ing more complicated solids than the pulled-out 2D of Fatboyslim, the obvious final progression was a fully 3D Fatabet (top right), which replaced my signature panel on the 'paper space' drawing files - main/left-hand image, taking the original circular disc concept to a full sphere.

New 'W' mind! The constriction of boolean geometries meant some simplification to get the curved ogee 'edges' to go-in properly! In simple terms, boolean means "Right, OR wrong, there is NO grey", and if your invisible mesh, underlying everything, has a single fault, the whole thing is 100% wrong!

I'm actually tackling a letter 'R' in the bottom-right shot and you can see how you pull-up the 2D 'R' (white lines), leaving you with an extruded, R-shaped rod (red lines), which you then subtract from a solid sphere (pink Lines) leaving you with a stable ball-letter, that then needs some sharp-edges rounding-off, which is where it can all go very wrong; if the continuous ogee (which runs right around the edges of each 'trench' or hole) won't go-in when told to!

For instance, the ogee running round the larger trenches in the 'H', have to have a greater radius than the smaller trenches in the 'W', which can affect the visual uniformity of the different letters in the alphabet, a uniformity which is precisely what I've been trying to achieve sine 1981! 'D' notwithstanding - the bastard, so; you have to compromise at each stage, but these two look OK together  . . . I think?

And . . . it's all good fun, that's the thing, it's another skill, it's another life-experience, you know? Another box ticked in an otherwise miserably short life. Parachuting is still on the list!

News, Views Etc...

I love a single issue website that really nails the subject and here for fans of rub-down pictures is a brilliant site for the old Lettraset ranges...

http://www.action-transfers.com/html/a_a/chronology.shtml

Used to love these when we were kids...I have an unused Star Wars one some where, which came in a mixed lot of crud from an auction!