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!