I've been looking at a lot of books on street art recently and this piece by the French artist Poch caught my eye. It was a low-resolution image in a PDF book and the picture had been taken at an angle leading to the key-stoning seen in the first image below. By using a path lying along the grout lines of the wall I used transformations in GIMP to straighten the image. I then recreated it as a vector-based image so that it could be rendered at any size.
Original photo
Path along grout lines
After transformation
After vectorisation
As I worked with the image, I began to realise what had attracted me to it. The first was the, now obvious, reference to the classic 1972 Penguin book cover of Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange". The cover, featuring what is now commonly referred to as the ‘cog-eyed droog’, borrowed Alex’s famous bowler hat and turned his mascara-lashed eye into a cog, playing up the ‘clockwork’ theme of free will (link ). I hadn't noticed that the number on the helmet was clearly a reference to the creation date of this cover until my nephew, Brad, pointed it out. The second resonance was to the simple, stylised racing helmets of the Playforever range of toy cars.
With the vectorisation stage (using a stylus on the iPad), the challenge was to try and find a balance in smoothing out the roughness along the perimeter. The hand-created look needs to be kept, while bearing in mind that the final image will be cut from thin card with a scalpel. I do confess to feeling slightly uneasy painstakingly cutting out the copyright symbol ...
The cog-eyed droog
The helmet from Playforever's Midnight Clyde
I then took the most of the colours from the book cover and applied them to the Pock piece:
The goggles are designed to be silvered, and one of the teeth is intended to be gold.
I used a Stroud-based frame-maker to make the box frame from black-stained ash. The frame, which is 410x510mm, contains two sheets of glass to sandwich the cut-out and a blackened fillet to separate the glass from the back of the frame. A sheet of heavy-duty unpainted watercolour paper forms the background.
Acrylic paint has been applied to the back of the second sheet of glass. The teeth were painted white rather than allow the white background to show through as it was a lot more crisp. One of the teeth was backed by 23.75 carat gold leaf.
After some experimenting, I made the goggles from the lid of a biscuit tin. This gives a silver sheen but without a totally mirrored surface. It is reflective but this is hard to capture in a photo where the plane of the camera's CCD is the same as that of the picture. The left image shows the effectiveness of the tin section.
April 2022