This is my most popular screenprint – the edition of 12 are now all sold. The pattern at the bottom is from a frieze inside the terminal. The top part of the control tower is the old 1930s version. The colors are Art Deco. The silkscreens were made from hand-cut Rubylith – no computers were involved in the making of this print. Concorde and the contrail across a deep blue sky are a sort of trademark of mine now.
This is a pen, ink and wash sepia painting (well, Burnt Sienna, actually) of the photo below.
This is a postcard-sized watercolour, made from the photo below.
This is the original photograph I took of the Seven Sisters. The sun was just going down.
A detail from this screenprint is used for the blog’s header. It’s a view from Seaford Head looking east towards Beachy Head. The Atonement connection is with the film of the same name – there’s a scene where they live in one of these cottages. The cottages have been used for locations in many films and TV programmes. I wanted this to be the postcard view, so I bought a postcard, took a photo from the same location and made the screenprint at BIP using the photo as a guide. I’ve also done various watercolours of the same scene. I wanted it to look like a Brian Cook book jacket for Batsford, or a 1930s railway poster, in simple flat Art Deco colours. The silkscreens were made from hand-cut Rubylith – no computers were involved in the making of this print. There is only one print left from an edition of eight.
This is one of the watercolours that sold at the Dragonfly House. It is of nearby Saltdean Lido, from a photo of how it was before it was restored, soon after I moved to Brighton in 1987. A story I heard was that the platform on the roof was intended to be for a cablecar to the Ocean Hotel (now flats) up on the hill. The style is Art Deco, which I hope is reflected in the colours used.
Solar-powered beach hut
I also still do some illustration work. Here is a Donald McGill-style watercolour (yes, real watercolour!) for a local entrepreneur hoping to sell solar panels to beach hut owners not permitted to have regular electricity. It was drawn in Sennelier indian ink on Aquarelle Arches cold-pressed paper (indian ink is getting hard to find these days) using a Gillott 303 nib. My ‘normal’ way of working is to draw in ink onto layout/marker paper, scan into Photoshop, convert to vectors using Streamline, and finally colour-in using Freehand. Unfortunately Streamline doesn’t wok in OS X, but seems happy enough in ‘classic’ mode!
Fred Pipes's Art Blog 