Monthly Archives: March 2010

As I promised in my last posting, here is a clip of part of our Sunday evening jam session.   In it I’m drawing with Die. Puntigam and the soundtrack is from the album ‘Drinking Songs’ by Matt Elliott (very appropriate….!)

Dima took this with my little Canon Ixus 100IS  but I think, for such a small camera, that the quality of the recording is really excellent.  As it will be a while before Dima has all the footage from the big cameras edited and ready to upload I thought I’d post this as a ‘taster’ now.  
I had drawn with Die. Puntigam in some of the artists’ jam sessions in York last year and I was so pleased to have this opportunity to draw with him again.  Now I’m really looking forward to our next sessions in Austria!

Lst Saturday was my birthday – what better excuse to have a big Tagtooling weekend!Our Tagtool friends from Austria arrived on Friday and the party began right away with drinks in the kitchen and then after dinner everyone went into the studio to set up the equipment.It required the combined efforts of Matthias, Seppy, Joerg and Dima to get the visitors’ extra projectors, different video cameras and Tagtools to all work together but quite soon they had everything set up and ready to go – and as this photo shows, it all looked very impressive.

(Die. Puntigam on Tagtool)

For the first jam session they had the projectors focussed on one wall only behind our new performance corner but on Sunday they were able to reorganise the set up to have all four projectors and two Tagtools working so that it was possible for two people to draw together across both walls – a really huge and exciting projection area!   Here are a few photos that I took with my little camera.(Matthias on Tagtool, Dima on Guitar)Jan and Matthias on TagtoolsDie. Puntigam and Frances on TagtoolsOn Saturday I didn’t take any photos but instead spent all my time either drawing or partying (especially  partying!!)….so most of the pictures above are from our Sunday jamming – when we continued drawing intensively until well after midnight!  Matthias, Jan, Seppy, Die. Puntigam and I all drew and in my next posting I will have the video clips that Dima is putting together from the material that he, Joerg and Seppy recorded during the weekend.  When a group of people get together to draw like this it is always a lot of fun – but it is also a very interesting and illuminating experience.   You discover such a lot, not only about how other people go about drawing, but I find that when I draw with someone else I learn new things about how I draw as well.   All too soon it was time to pack up the Tagtools and head for home – but we will all meet up next month at the Chink Chank in Tulln  –  and that will be another great collective drawing opportunity!

This is the first time that we have used our new Tagtool set up and performance corner so I thought I’d post this video of part of the rehearsal (It ends abruptly because Dima had forgotten to switch off his mobile and it went off suddenly!)

The two projectors and the Dualhead2go give a huge drawing area – which is great! The only limitation (which I think is quite interesting and no bad thing to have to work with) is that at the moment Dima has the Tagtool set up in such a way that when you draw on the Wacom pad there are 3 overlapping screens to make up the whole image (ie if you want to draw on the left side of the picture you have to press ‘1’ on the computer, ‘2’ gives you the central area and ‘3’ the right side). This means that it is not possible to make a continuous pen stroke across the whole drawing area from side to side (but of course vertical strokes are fine) and I still have to get used to clicking the screen number on the computer quickly when I want to change the area I’m drawing on as well as operating the Tagtool – but it’s not much of a problem really.
We are having a big Tagtool crew here next weekend – so I’m hoping to be able to post some mega-jam sessions using our new set up quite soon!

I didn’t post any entries on the blog in February so this is something of  a ‘catch up’ posting.   Over the last few weeks I have been doing some Tagtool drawing in the studio as a ‘background’ for Dima to play guitar.  Here are a couple of photos from these sessions.
Sometimes I tried to ‘follow’ Dima’s playing by building up a variety of patterns and textures, but I also made some of my usual figurative and landscape work too. Although the projection area was quite large, directing the beam from floor level meant that a lot of the lower part of the drawing area was obscured by Dima and all his equipment. Directing the projection higher up the wall just didn’t work very well so to solve this problem we decided to completely reorganise the studio!
We have now built (using old pallets) a slightly raised area in one corner of the studio for the Tagtool set-up and another, larger, built up performance area (also from old pallets and other scrap materials) in the opposite corner. We bought a second (matching) BenQ projector and with our Dualhead2go we are now able to cover the walls behind the whole of the new performance corner. Dima made two wooden trays to hold the projectors, which he has mounted on two heavy tripods. We are very excited about this new arrangement – so here are a few photos showing the building and testing process.The construction of the raised area for the Tagtool workstation.Building the performance area.Testing the projectors – all systems working and ready to go!

I have now made an album of the video clips of our January concert with Weisse Weande at Garage X in Vienna.
You can find them on Vimeo by clicking this link:- http://www.vimeo.com/album/188069