Ninth Wave Designs

Beannachtai na Féile Pádraig!

Here is a post from the NWD archive in celebration of St. Patrick's day:

M Is For Medieval: Or How The Irish Invented The Moleskine.

Beannachtai na Féile Pádraig!

NWD at CafePress: Beta

I have finally gotten around to opening up a Ninth Wave Designs merchandise store at CafePress.com.  So many bloggers have set up CafePress stores as a way to offset the costs of blogging that I thought this would be a great way to pay the Typepad bills without adding Google advertising to the blog.  I have a large backlog of original Celtic artwork available to adorn the variety of products offered by CafePress, so I have started listing items for sale with an eye toward the upcoming St. Patrick's Day holiday.   I have begun with a few different images of St. Patrick himself, like the journal shown here, as a way to tie in with the festivities.  I am happy to announce that the store is in what I would call the Beta stage: Fully operational, but with a number of minor tweaks and adjustments still to be made.  Additionally, I will be adding loads more products to the store as the days progress towards March 17th, featuring a number of additional artwork images.  Check back daily to see what is new!

I thought I would give you a little background information on the artwork featured in the NWD CP store.  The images featured on the journals, mugs, tee-shirts and other products are all original Celtic designs created by yours truly, and were done primarily between 2000 and 2005.  I created this artwork all by hand, without using the computer for any part of the design.  Call me a Luddite, but my creative inspiration for this artwork comes from the illuminated manuscripts of early medieval Ireland, so although my technique does not replicate that historic method (no goats were skinned in the process of making my art) I still experience a connection to that time in working entirely by hand.

The images are first drawn out in pencil on graph paper and then transferred to artist quality illustration board.  I ink the outlines of the artwork and then paint the design using liquid acrylic inks.  My method of mixing colors for these somewhat complicated designs involves using only three primary colors of ink, intermixing them to get all the colors in the image.  This helps build a strong relationship between all the colors used in the image, and eliminates much of the chances of having colors clash within the design.  Some color areas of the paintings are built up with as many as 8 or more layers of colors to create the right quality for the image.  The process of creating this artwork is very labor intensive, with even a small painting (5" x 7") taking me several weeks from start to finish.

Have a browse through the first items now available, and if you see something you would like to order you will also be able to enjoy helping to support the NWD blog - future posts as well as the archive of all the Moleskine related information created since July 2005.  Bookmark the store and check back again soon for new items including a number of Celtic tee-shirt designs and images created from my Alchemy Notebook project.  If there is a specific type of product you would like to see that is not listed yet just let me know and I will add it to the offering.   Enjoy!

Brian Eno's Notebook

I am just getting around to reading my February issue of Wired magazine, and I spotted this picture of an interesting notebook on the contents page.  You can see the full article on page 68 of issue 15.02, or online HERE.  The very small picture shows the personal notebook of musician/artist Brian Eno, and I would like to know if anyone has a guess as to what kind of notebook this might be.  The article describes it as containing sketches Eno did in the 1980s, so the notebook must be at least 20 years old.  It is difficult to tell from the photo what the size and scale of the notebook is, but it does have lined pages with a larger margin at the top of the page, a smaller one at the bottom, and the lines appear to have a bluish color to them.  In the photo the pages look to have a cream color to them, but that could also be due to the age of the paper.  The page layout is very similar to a large Classic Moleskine ruled notebook, but it isn't one as far as I can tell.

It's easier to see the details of this little photo in the print version of the magazine, so if you are a subscriber it might help to look at it there.  I wish the picture was larger, and I realize this isn't much to go on, but I thought maybe someone out there might have a good guess to offer anyway.     Thanks!

Alchemy Notebook XII

I have just added some new images to the Alchemy Notebook Gallery, having finished a few pages that I have been wanting to work on for some time.  I have missed the process of working on the images in this series and it feels good to be back to work in my Moleskine sketchbook again.

There are some more detailed images in the gallery, as well as on Flickr.

These pages were done using the usual materials: Liquid acrylic inks, Prismacolor watercolor pencils, Kooh-I-Noor Nexus pens, and metallic arcylic paint, in a pocket size Moleskine Classic Sketchbook.

You can also see the full set of pages in the order that they appear in the notebook in this Flickr Set HERE - which has a nifty slideshow viewing option.

Dear, Dear Diary.

Here's a little example of the power of notebooks and diaries that I came across recently while reading Sarah Waters' novel, Affinity.

"I had been sitting very still to listen to her.  Now, becoming more aware of myself, I found that I was cold, and I drew my coat a little closer about me.  The action made my note-book show at my pocket, and I saw her looking at it.  All the time we talked, then, her gaze kept returning to that edge of book; until at last, when I rose to leave her, she said, Why did I always carry a book with me?  Did I mean to write about the women of the gaol?

I told her then that I take my note-book with me wherever I go - that it was a habit I had fallen into when helping my father with his work.  I said I should feel very strange without it, and that what I wrote in it I sometimes later put into another book, that was my diary.  I said that that book was like my dearest friend.  I told it all my closest thoughts, and it kept them secret.

She nodded.  My book was like her, she said - it had no-one to tell.  I might as well say my closest thoughts there, in her cell.  Who did she have, to pass them on to?"

Affinity is an epistolary novel, told in the form of entries from the diaries of the two main characters.   What made this section jump out at me the most is the way that it captures the curiosity associated with carrying and keeping notebooks.  Who has seen someone writing in their notebook or drawing in their sketchbook in a cafe, and hasn't secretly wanted to seize the thing and examine all the pages while the author is off getting a refill?   Or conversely, who hasn't been themselves aware of the general interest that carrying a notebook inspires in others?  It's part of the fun, really, to be doing something so intensely private as writing about your intimate goings-on in your diary, but doing it in such a public place.  It's the feeling of - I want you to know, but I don't want you to know, at least not until I decide to show you myself.  It's the fun of building a mystery.

Additionally this section from Waters' novel appealed to me because it personifies the main character's diary as her closest friend, and reinforces the sense that she views her diary as a real person by having the second character also identify herself as a book of secrets.  Viewing a diary as a friend has come to have more meaning to me lately, as I have finally come to a place in my life where I am actually keeping a personal diary.  The irony of this shift in my perspective hasn't been lost on me - that only after coming to the end of spending three years selling diaries to others did I finally arrive at a place in my life where I had a deep need to write a daily, personal and confessional diary myself. 

I have come to see that for most of you out there, the real reason for your passion for Moleskine diaries all these years hasn't only been (as I thought) about form, function and quality, but that it has also been about being selective with the company you keep.  It's been about whom you are willing to trust with your most personal thoughts - it's been about carefully choosing your dearest friend.   As sappy as all that sounds, I still think it is absolutely true.  Hidden under the weight of all the cynicism associated with well-crafted marketing plans you will find that your Moleskine is still just a diary after all, and as such its worth is determined only by what you yourself entrust to its pages.   You may also discover as I have, that when you do find a friend that you can share your closest thoughts with, one who you know will keep them secret, life feels a lot less lonely because of it.