Tag: printing

Mischievous rats and toothy spuds

I see Banksy’s been working from home recently.

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It’s good to see that strangely creative people are continuing to be strangely creative during the lockdown. And they don’t come much stranger than James O’Brien.

Meet the artist spending his quarantine making potato prints of celebrity dentures – It’s Nice That
Beginning the project a few weeks ago as countries around the world began to head into lockdown, “like most people at this time, I was feeling a bit lost and longed to hear or see something familiar,” says James. “My dad loved listening to Terry Wogan, so I made a set of Wogan’s dentures. I don’t quite know why dentures,” he says, “but I found it oddly comforting.”

Posting the results on his Instagram, James then decided he’d offer up his services to anyone in need of a free set of celebrity dentures on a postcard (everyone). “It went berserk: Freddie Mercury, Jurgen Klopp, Joanna Lumley, Elton John, Madonna, Bowie (original set), Ken Dodd, the list goes on.”

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We all need a hobby, I guess. You must check out his Dictator potato printed calendar, Dictatoes, for a glimpse into the hobbies of Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin and friends.

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South of the river

In this contribution to The Guardian’s Illustrated City series, writer, printmaker and illustrator Francesca Roe shares with us her views of our home town, or rather, the lower, grubbier half of it.

Faded grandeur: the industrial glories of neglected south Leeds – a cartoon
A walk through south Leeds reveals a district caught between industrial grandeur, post-industrial wasteland and urban blandness. The starting point is Leeds station, where the 1960s edifice and the 1930s art-deco concourse sit directly above the Dark Arches, a series of vaults spanning the River Aire that serve as the station’s foundation. A metal walkway passes through the Dark Arches and over the Aire, where passers-by can stop and watch the churning water receding into darkness. Around 18m bricks were used to construct the arches during the 1860s – the largest such project in the world at that time.

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Through the Dark Arches lies the Leeds-Liverpool canal and the gentrified tip of Holbeck: “Holbeck Urban Village”, a tight knot of former red-brick flax mills and steam engine works. The Round Foundry dates back to 1795 and was once home to steam engine manufacturers; today the complex is home to offices, a brewery and Yorkshire’s official tourist board. The gentrification of this small part of Holbeck has done little to ease poverty in south Leeds as a whole, but it has preserved a part of the district’s history that was previously at risk.

Some wonderful illustrations accompany this melancholic piece, with more on Instagram. Very evocative of the inner-city scrappiness and griminess of the area.

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Here’s a link to some more of her writing on a similar theme, how cities deal with their past.

What should cities do with ‘dark sites’, where tragic or sinister events occurred?
It’s unsurprising that communities want to physically erase the sites of violent crimes. In other cases, though, dark sites hold a deeper historic and social significance that can be commemorated. In these cases, redevelopment offers an alternative to demolition. High Royds Hospital was a psychiatric institution in Leeds which closed in 2003 and turned into housing. I remember walking around the site in the early stages of redevelopment. The grounds felt desolate, and it was easy to imagine the abuses that took place there.

No place like home?

Inside the paper torture chambers

Why paper jams persist
There are many loose ends in high-tech life. Like unbreachable blister packs or awkward sticky tape, paper jams suggest that imperfection will persist, despite our best efforts. They’re also a quintessential modern problem—a trivial consequence of an otherwise efficient technology that’s been made monumentally annoying by the scale on which that technology has been adopted. Every year, printers get faster, smarter, and cheaper. All the same, jams endure.

A fascinating glimpse into the strange world of printers and jambusting, involving physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, computer programming, and interface design.

“The smooth functioning of the world depends on invisible tribological improvements.”

Couldn’t agree more.

Book making

Book making

That’s not a proper book
There’s only one copy of it, unlike a proper print run. Technically all I’ve done is printed one copy of the web page for personal use. But it feels odd. Books are usually mass produced. With a few clicks I could print off as many copies as I want with no additional work. Scaling atoms like you scale software. And it baffles the author when you ask them to sign it.

He’s made a book. Or just printed out an article from the web. Can’t tell which, but would love to give this a go myself.