Philagraphic Art

By the way, the Marriage Equality cover is my first one to be qualified as 'superperfect' in my language!

Beautiful work, Linda! I’m inspired by your masking-tape method.

Linda  your artwork is exceptional, thank you for putting it to such a good use.

A smiling Great White? I love it.

dorincard

I did record myself drawing the first Cohen cover but the problem is that high-resolution raw footages take a lot of space on my hard drive (I am always running out of space) and time to edit. Unless I can make a living out of this, I am not likely to be able to create many speed-up videos of my drawing process.

I can't, because the photograph based on which I drew Cohen is potentially copyrighted.

Wow, that's a remarkable video.  I would never have guessed that there was so much erasing involved!  And I was also surprised to see how many different pens / pencils are used to make the drawing - a bit after you start working on the second eye (3:10 or so) there is a look at all (most?) of the drawing tools in use.

Ryan

JeffS -- I will have to look into this matter. I am never sure that's why I prefer to take a more careful approach.

Ryan -- Indeed, I think I do more erasing while drawing than other artists do. Sometimes it's because as an OCD patient, I feel that the pencil mark I just made is not 'perfect enough'. So I would erase it entirely and restart again. Other times though (I would say maybe 40% of the times), I use eraser to partially lift the graphite in order to achieve the effect I long for; this is especially true when I use the (grey) kneaded eraser. When erasing a pencil mark of sufficient darkness, I also tend to use kneaded eraser to lift the extra graphite on the surface before applying a regular eraser to prevent smudging. You may have this experience as a child: when you erase a dark pencil mark, the graphite that stays on the surface of the paper gets dragged with the movement of the eraser and leaves a faint trace around. I particularly want to avoid getting my drawing 'dirty', so I take extra step that not all artists are wanted to do.

In this Cohen piece though, there is a large-area erasing on the cloth because I wasn't happy with the result I was getting, so I just started anew.

As for drawing tools, they are basically graphite in different hardness. Every mechanical pencil is loaded with a lead of different hardness, ranging from 2H to 4B (which is the darkest lead manufacturer produces; I guess it's physically impossible to produce any 0.5 lead softer than that). For portrait, I tend to limit my pencils to 4B and below, because I like a softer/lighter feel to my portrait, but for other subject, I can use up to 10B which is only available in wooden case. Mechanical pencils are used for details; wood-cased pencils that have larger lead are used for larger area drawing or achieving special texture. This is the trick I used for drawing the texture on cloth: the paper I use has a surface texture. When a broader lead goes across the surface, the mark it left is 'less dense' and contain more white space, because the pencil is not sharp enough to go into each up and down of the surface. (Many people thought I must have placed a textured paper underneath my drawing paper to achieve the cloth texture effect, but this is not true, it's simply achieved by varying lead width and the angle at which I apply the pencil mark.)

Thank you! I got it now.
Interesting that there no visible hyperlink in your post; I just clicked on your text, and it sent me to Google Photos.
I also see that I could have clicked on Linda's "this Cohen video".

At the time I called this artworks 'covers', I thought cover was the front page of the envelope or a shipping label on a parcel. I didn't know the cover has to entirely contain the content of the mail. In the proper philatelic sense, envelope and shipping box are covers; a piece of paper cut off these objects is not exactly a cover.

So a renaming of my artworks is overdue. Any suggestion?

This time, I will try to go with a name as generic as possible, because I feel really awkward that my namesake is associated with an object.

In want of suitable appellations, can I just call it, simply, 'artwork'?

By the way, I like my designation of 'perfectness' of these items. I think I will keep that

But the Series I and Series II can just be called philatelic / postal artworks?

Hey paul1, can you write again the terms you coined the other day in the Shoutbox denoting my 'artworks / covers'? I lost track of them

sorry Linda, I'm struggling. I take it there isn't any text retrieval on the shoutbox after a certain number of days?? Can you give me a reasonably close idea of the date that we had this discussion please, I have a feeling I put something on the main board to someone, if not yourself.

whatever I did concoct previously has evaded my memory, but seem to recall that you're looking for alternatives to words like 'maxicard' and 'postcard', and which will reflect better the connection that your images have to stamp related subjects and topography (geographical).
I must have had some spark of innovation on that occasion which has now evaporated but working along the lines of your suggestions 12 hours ago, then perhaps some of the below are possibilities, bearing in mind that whatever is used must have a connection - however tenuous - to 'stamp' and 'image'.
The world of advertising loves 'gimmick' words - words that have an almost invented connection - could be phonetic, foreign or a contraction - but whatever it must appeal and be memorable. A very good example was the '80s jargon word 'Filofax, which described the portable diary cum reference file owned by 'Yuppies', which itself was one of the best contractions and very memorable - I wasn't a Yuppie (young urban professional), so didn't have a Filofax.

So ...... pictogram - pictaview - philogram - philoview - stampogram - filataview - stampview - philoview - philagraph - philograph - filoview - postaview - filonews - philanews - stampix - philopix.      Adding the s for  plural might  make some  sound a tad better.
Sorry Linda that's it - moral of the story is keep our best ideas as hard copy in future.