I've been having this nagging feeling that I haven't been doing enough with these blogging & social media tools lately. I guess it's still relatively new to me, but I also tend to adhere to the belief that if I haven't got anything really worth saying then it's better not to put out endless trivia.

I have to admit that I've never been the most social of people in real life so it should be small wonder that my online social network is limited, though at least not non-existent.

Still, I've been wondering why I haven't gotten more into the habit of tweeting & blogging on a regular basis. I worry that I am in fact simply a profoundly boring individual, bereft of opinion or anything interesting to say about myself & the world around me. Perhaps I am more zombie than human, just living out some meaningless existence until the flesh finally rots from my bones.
Ok, so I know this isn't true (well, at least not entirely) but I do find myself thinking about this kind of stuff from time to time. I know it takes real effort to live more than a mundane existence, and the reality is that most of us are locked into the day to day ritual of work & maintaining our domestic surroundings. It can easily seem like things are in a weird stasis.

So in the end I've worked out that the reason I've been particularly quiet online of late is simply that I've been back at work again. It's been very full days of concentrated painting - no time for those micro distractions where tweeting becomes a possibility. It's been full on focus to get a large volume of work out to a demanding client. The evenings are purely eating & sleeping.

That's why it goes quiet sometimes.

It's just been a beautifully sunny Sunday.
Spent some time down at Lakeside Park in Nottingham.

A little fun with CJ & Time-Lapse. I decided to ditch iMovie in favour of Slice on the iPhone to edit this - iMovie is too limited in terms of audio & Slice just seems to do more.

More fun with time-lapse animation. Keep a close eye open for the very last frame...freaky!

I finally attempted a time-lapse video showing my typical painting process. The camera jumps about once or twice - the positioning & lighting could be better. Interesting though. Odd seeing yourself work, with a process that usually takes many hours reduced to just a few minutes.

This is a little different for me as I mostly make highly representational paintings, but it's kinda got me thinking about playing some more with abstraction.

When Nick Max of CHC-Land in Nottingham asked me to come and take a look at what he described as a "small job" in late December 2010, I imagined something of the nature of a logo or stationary design for the business. To my surprise, in a back store room at Lace Market House, he revealed to me a dirty, dented & rust damaged metal Italian Consulate sign.

When I first laid eyes on that sorry looking object and listened to Nicks request to "maybe clean it up a bit and remove the rust", I have to admit that my first quiet thoughts were to make for a hasty retreat. There were a number of reasons for this, not least being the fact that I'd never done anything of this nature in all my time as freelance commercial artist. I've worked with a myriad different artistic mediums, painted many kinds of subjects in a wide variety of styles and diversified my practice to include digital, 3d and print as well as traditional techniques. But I'd never tried to restore a piece like this before. I know it sounds silly but there was also a part of me that felt that this object was somehow imbued with a special history & cultural significance which deserved a full treatment by a seasoned expert restorer, wherever one might find such a person. But I knew that this was out of the question as there was a very limited budget to even stabilise the sign with its rust and flaking paint.

Here I also need to state that I have a creative respect for that special breed of artisan, the traditional sign painter, who could paint with such speed & economy and whose line work was often so beautifully rendered. But theirs is an almost extinct trade nowadays with the advent of commercial printed signage. Someone with those skills was going to be tricky to track down and probably asking a lot for their skills.

So, with some degree of intrepidness I decided to give the clean up operation a go. I was, however, sure to make it clear to Nick that this was somewhat out of my field of expertise which he acknowledged.

Stage 1 - Cleaning up the sign and removing the rust.

The Consulate sign actually sat in my studio for quite some time after I first bought it away from Lace Market House. Some weeks earlier I had suffered a severe flare-up of an ongoing back injury which had incapacitated me for a significant period and for which I was still making a slow recovery with regular physio sessions. This led to something of a back-log of work which I had to wade through before I could get started on the sign.

I had plenty of time to consider my approach, which I decided would be to try to preserve as much as possible of the original design & paintwork as I could. Late in January I eventually started (with the help of my partner CJ) very tentatively to clean with a combination of a very light abrasive sponge product & water. I removed the rust with the finest grade wire wool and brasso.

The cleaning process took quite some hours as I was very conscious of preserving what little remained of the design. Much of the central motif was only faintly defined by the glue originally used to stick down the original gold-leaf on top of which had been painted the detailed line work. Some of this line work also thankfully remained - I was to be glad of this later. But the glue was very susceptible to abrasion, probably explaining why so little of the gold leaf had survived over the years.

I had intended to fill the areas where the rust had been which, after cleaning, had left significant cavities through the base coats of white enamel to the bare metal below. However, I decided against this as I felt it would probably be harder to control the car body filler which I was going to use which might risk detroying more of the surface and design. Instead I actually used the enamel paint, very liberally but carefully applied, to fill the cavities. Enamel paint is quite thin when first applied so as it settles the top surface tends to even out nicely. In this way I manage to avoid having to sand off any excess filler. The results wern't absolutely perfect, still leaving very slight depressions in the surface, but far less damaging than the alternative. All that remained of this initial clean up was to colour match these areas to the slightly off white colour of the original paint. I also touched in areas of the outer grey border to sharpen up the sign if it was to be displayed at this stage.

I was starting to consider the possibility, however, that I could do more with this sign. My confidence had grown as I worked on it.

 

Stage 2 - Restoring the Lettering

I took the newly cleaned & rust repaired sign in to show Nick, who straight way acknowledged the improvement. Gee'd up by this and my own sense of intrigue, I suggested that we might further improve the overall sharpness by doing the necessary paint work on the lettering. At this point I still seriously doubted that I could fully restore the central motif, and was aware that Nick didn't really want to pour a lot of money into the project. But he quickly agreed to this next stage and I busied away back to the studio.

Painting in the gaps in the lettering was quite straitforward in fact, although time consuming as great care had to be taken to colour match and seek reference for one or two areas that had been completely lost to rust. I was able to find online two or three very good high resolution images showing other Italian Consulate signs around the world to which I could draw reference. I was able to fairly accurately mix various enamel colours to touch-in and the results made a striking difference as I looked over the development photos I'd taken as I worked.

I should note, however, that painting in the lettering wasn't strictly an accurate restoration in terms of how the sign had been originally produced. It's still somewhat a mystery exactly how it was done, but I suspect that the letters were either stencilled or indeed shapes that were stuck down - they are somewhat raised from the surface of the rest of the sign. In any case, from an angle you can see the areas that I've touched-in, but this was the most cost effective way I could come up with to restore at least the original appearance of the sign.

 

Stage 3 - The Central Motif

From an early point I decided that it would be a usefull exercise to post some development photos on my Facebook profile so that Nick and others in my network could see how the project was prgressing. This was to prove an interesting and entertaining medium for moving on to the next stage - the dreaded central motif. My confidence had continued to grow as I'd been painting the lettering, and I'd even sourced and tested an enamel based gold paint - just in case things moved on.

I have to include the brief exchange that took part in the comments for those photos:

Daniel Rose: Lettering touched-in. Big decision now, whether or not to restore the central motif. This is without doubt where the bulk of the painting work is.

Mike Marchant (an old friend from York): Definitely do it, Dan. Be inspired by all the great Italian painters.

Nicholas Max: Dan, we have to go for it. I am going to open a bottle of Chianti and try and obliterate the cost from my mind. Carry on please...

I could have done with a bottle myself, as this final stage was to prove really quite a challenge.

I decided on a two-part approach. The first part encompassed the central star and lower banner designs, both of which had the most detail remaining from the original work. The second was to tackle the outer laurels where almost no detail remained. I knew these were going to prove tricky.

The first thing I found was that I had a big problem with the enamel gold paint I'd chosen. I'd tested it on a porous surface and it went down brilliantly, but now I was applying it to the non-porous surface of the sign I found it was leaving horrible splotches and even rubbing clean away the instant it touched the surface. This was a big deal - it would take many coats of this to cover and I just didn't have time to do that. I had to quickly find a solution and thankfully I found another metallic enamel which, although very dull by comparison to the first, painted very well onto the surface of the sign and served as a fine base for the top-coat of my original choice. Phew!

Once that problem was solved it was just a matter of carefully working with what I could see of the existing design and painting over it. I had to sand down some of the more prominant areas of gold leaf glue but all went very well on this first part. The only area that really gave me problems was the central star itself, over which was very difficult to achieve a totally flat surface and the gold paint with it's metallic properties has a habit of showing up all the imperfections. Still, it came out very well and in the time I'd allotted.

The outer laurels were to prove much more difficult, and it's in these areas that I had to rely almost solely on the references I'd found online. I had to painstakingly redraw by hand all the shapes of the foliage, only to obliterate much of this detail with the gold layers and then redraw all the outlines again in enamel to achieve the final sharp effect. This kind of thing doesn't usually bother me, but all the time I was very concerned about deviating from the original design and its details. To be self critical I think this gives a lot of my line work rather less of a spontaneous feel than is evident in other Italian Consulate signs. It's a subtle distinction, but one which I hope doesn't detract too much from the overall effect. On the other hand, something I did notice working closely with those references was how dodgy a lot of those details were in the originals. I would have to conclude from some of the wobbly lines in places and oddly shaped stars that a lot of these signs were really very quickly produced in their day. Where I tried to work exactly to the shapes that were there before, there are a number of aspects which I might consider flaws. In some ways the approach I've taken has left at least a small vestige of the original artists hand intact.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I finally finished all the little touching-in bits, just to remove a few of the more obvious blotches and scratches. Then I gave the sign two solid coats of Enamel Varnish and took back in to Lace Market House.

I think Nick is suitably happy with what I've been able to achieve. I have to commend him for being prepared to down that bottle of Chianti and swallow the extra cost of going all the way with restoring this little piece of history & culture to something approaching it's former glory. At least, I hope I've done it justice.

CJ, Phil & Ella & I took a walk around a few of the locations featured in Nottingham's Light Night 2011.
http://www.lightnight.co.uk/nottingham/index.php

Really enjoyed this a lot - great to enjoy the city revealed with some creative lighting & installations. Will be watching out for this next year.

So when CJ and I got up this morning we had a plan, a quirkily casual plan to visit an attraction known as (wait for it) 'The Devil's Arse' quite close to where we're staying on a weekend break in Derbyshire. The Devil's Arse is one of a series of natural caverns and mines in the Castleton area that have been run as local attractions with guided tours for a good many years now (I visited them several times back in the 70's & 80s as part of school & family trips).

Ok, I admit it was the quirky name that attracted us this time round, but caves are kinda fun. We were really looking forward to it.

But today just hasn't quite worked out even according to the vague plans we had. Firstly, after the frustration of being stuck for an hour behind Sunday drivers going 35-40 in 50 zones all the way to Buxton, an all day breakfast in a small cafe recommended by a friend was kinda ruined by the sloppy attitude of the teenager that took our order. He seemed like he'd rather have still been in bed - can't blame him but I wish he hadn't bothered going to work. Wouldn't mind but I'm really not a very demanding or sensitive customer, but this guy really managed to wind me up in one way or another.

When we finally got to The Devils's Arse it turns out that not only do we have to fork out the £8.25 admission per adult (which we already knew but seemed a little pricey for what it is really) but that we were also going to be hit for £3.00 parking as well.
There is apparently a parking discount scheme for cavern visitors but it isn't clear what this might be without first paying and going in.
Now, as I'm typing this it feels kinda petty - after all, what's £3.00 having driven all that way. Thing is, just about everything is like this these days - the advertised fee plus an unspecified amount that is almost certainly going to be slipped in, almost like a tax or surcharge. I wouldn't mind nearly as much if the actual costs were clearly specified in the leaflets or online blurb, but they're not. And this is the attractions own car park, from what I can work out.
It's as if the people who run these attractions have figured that once people have gone all that way into the Derbyshire Peaks we'll more than likely swallow the extras.

Well, this time we didn't. For the matter of the unexpected £3.00 we decided that it felt like our potential custom was being taken for granted, and we ended up driving the short distance up the road to Treak Cliff Caverns where the parking is free. Same slightly over-priced admission IMHO for a 40 minute tour, but at least no extra sting on the parking. Actually, I ended up enjoying the tour so much that I gave the guide (John) a £4.00 tip. Funny how things turn out.

On then from the caverns to Bakewell, where I was hoping to find a quality country pie for Sunday dinner. Well, we didn't actually end up stopping in Bakewell because having been misdirected twice by poorly placed or non existent signs we totally failed to find the car park until the whole experience had frustrated the hell out of me. We just drove off to Ashbourne where, having made it just in time to catch the last few minutes before the local bakers closed and paid yet another parking fee, the girl who served us completely forgot to put the main item we bought into the bag - which of course we didn't discover until we got back. I hate paying for goods I haven't received. A perfect end to a devil's arse of a day really.

Well, except that this forced us to root around the cupboards in the excellent Douglas's Barn in Parwich where we're staying to find eggs & bread to have a Sunday roast of scrambled eggs - which I hadn't had for absolutely years and enjoyed perhaps more than I should under the circumstances.

All this leads me to an observation that has surfaced via a number of experiences as well as conversations with various people of late - that as of the past few years it seems as if our experiences as customers feel somehow tainted by the attitudes of those operating some businesses today. It feels as if even basic levels of consideration and openness, of strait-forward transparency, are now being somehow eroded. I can only suspect that this feeling will continue to develop as the current economic climate continues or worsens.

I think the sad thing for me is that today's experience makes me feel a little less likely to hurry back to the area, or to recommend that others come. A shame as I genuinely do love Derbyshire.
I have a sneaking suspicion that as more and more people begin to rely on personal recommendations to inform their choice of experiences via online social networks, this kind of negative reports of certain businesses and practices might become more influential. So watch out if you're trying too hard to squeeze that extra bit of cash out of your paying customers - they may not put up with it forever, steer others away from you, and head for fairer deals.

A further observation leads me to suspect that I have now officially become a grumpy old man at the age of 40, but that I can still (just about) steer those prickly annoying experiences in a positive direction, for now at least.