Monthly Archives: August 2016

On Saturday 20 August I was drawing to accompany Vložte kočku at the ‘koncert pro šumavskou divočinu‘, a festival to promote awareness and conservation of the forests in the Šumava region. The event was held at the pension, U  Parádů, in a beautiful valley near the town of Prachatice.  The performance took place in the barn outside the main house and although the wall behind the band was dark wood and not very large, there was plenty of space for me to do improvised drawings above the heads of the musicians.The barn was so packed with people that part of the audience had to stand outside as well inside and at times it was difficult for me to see what I was drawing over the heads of the crowd.  Dima managed to take a few  photos for me with his mobile phone – here’s a selection.It’s some time since I did Tagtool drawing for Vložte kočku and  I really enjoyed this concert. The music was great and the audience very enthusiastic, so when you add to this the beautiful location – it was the recipe for a perfect evening!

The two images above are from the little test session that I did (using our projector mounted sideways) from the balcony of the Lumitrix office in Prague and as these photos show there is a lot of ambient light both fixed and from passing cars and trams. The balcony was very small and one overhead tram light was directly in my line of sight so there was a part of the wall where I couldn’t see what I was drawing. But despite these limitations, this was a great location for drawing and I enjoyed just playing and trying out different out different images.

The Lumitrix company produce high quality plug’n’play  all weather projectors designed for permanent outdoor projections and the idea was to use this wall opposite their offices as an outdoor ‘on the street’ gallery to showcase the work of different artists. Having done this test session with our projector (on a nice dry evening of course!) I prepared a session in our studio which Dima then rendered so that it could be projected as a continuous loop to play all evening using the all weather Lumitrix projection equipment.It was very interesting for me to stand on the street and ‘watch myself drawing’.  Below are a few of Dima’s photos.For this continuous projection Dima speeded up my drawing, which worked quite well, but having seen the result I think I would like to do another session and get Dima to make my drawing develop a little more slowly and have a pause between each ‘completed’ drawing in the sequence…but as this photo below shows, Kuba (our boss at Lunchmeat) thought the session was OK! 

…a return visit for us to this festival at Valeč, near Karlovy Vary. This year Mutanti were playing in the tent at C Stage and there was a very large and enthusiastic audience for their concert.  The stage lighting was turned off for Mutanti’s performance and our projector was able to cover the whole width of the roof of the tent above the stage – but although I was standing on a box I could only just see the heads of the musicians above the audience who were standing in front of me, packed tightly inside the tent.Most of Mutanti’s music now is very familiar to me which made it not quite so difficult to make quick changes of mood between their songs, many of which are quite short. Below is my accompaniment to the song ‘Chernobyl’ – which was helped along by the enthusiastic hand waving of the audience making shadows as I was drawing to ‘catch’ the mutant animals…great fun!But as well as old favourites, they also played some new material – and below is my drawing for the two songs, ‘Julie’ and ‘Si tu navic’After this there was a complete change of scene for another audience favourite, the song, ‘Discotheque’……which was followed by ‘Uncle Honza’ with the little girl on the swing.The last photo for this post shows the beginnings of my drawing for the song about a housing estate……but at this point the battery in Dima’s camera gave out -so I have no more photos! This was really sad because I did quite a bit more drawing and at the ‘official’ end of the concert the audience invaded the stage, dancing and clapping and demanding encores. Dima put away his camera and took up the gamepad and we did some quick fire animations. There was a great party atmosphere and Mutanti were in top form – so it was very, very late before we were able to pack up the Tagtool and head for home!