Mike Lyon

Painting Drawing Printmaking Japanese Woodblock Printing Furniture Lighting

Small drawings with square spirals

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Why spirals? Because I can vary the density of my lines in any area without cross-hatching and without lifting the pen. This lends itself to the kind of repeating procedures (program) I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. But curving spirals (where the radius of the circle being drawn continuously expands from or contracts […]

Large drawing (Hal) with nested squares

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One issue with my simple drawing tools is that, for the most part, the mark produced is uniform in width and color (one exception is a brush. The brush can be pushed into the surface to make a thicker mark or pulled out to leave a thinner one). It occurred to me that, already having […]

32 Small drawings with characters

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July through November of 2018 I made a slew of small drawings in ink on paper using the two AxiDraw machines. From time to time as I work, I’ll edit and modify my program code so that the way I produce images changes. Most coders I’ve talked with are careful to archive each state of […]

Peregrine Bunny

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For several months I’d been immersed in a large commission piece for a very large corporation. It was a big project and was required to sign an NDA / non-disclosure agreement. There was a lot of back and forth as a number of executives added their input, taste, requirements to the pot and that made […]

Linda

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This drawing was made on a full sheet of Rives BFK Black paper, using white ink and the AxiDraw. The image area is 11 x 8 inches, more or less centered in the sheet. I like the big black space and how Linda’s head floats in there.

Dad and Linda: first small AxiDraw drawings

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The AxiDraw is a simple, precise, and versatile pen plotter, capable of writing or drawing on almost any flat surface. It can write with fountain pens, permanent markers, and many other writing implements to handle an endless variety of applications. Its unique design features a writing head that extends beyond the machine, making it possible […]

Two small woodcuts using a wedged registration jig

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Many mokuhanga (Japanese technique woodcut) printers are using an L-shaped kento registration jig. This is so each block can be carved without registration kento and a corner pushed into the L-shaped jig during printing. One disadvantage of this method is that the block and jig can easily shift during handling and printing so registration is […]

Secret Garden (clover woodcut)

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“Secret Garden” is a view of clover near my Kansas City home, shot with my iPhone while walking Daisy, our dog. I still have this unreasonable urge to print more and more intensely complex images, but these dozen blocks, though not huge, took an average of around 20 hours each to carve (the longest carving […]

What if Christ died of natural causes?

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Having considered the act of creation through coding various processes to draw and paint, then documenting my code in my own image (see The code that moves the pen makes the image…), I’d been thinking about the use of religion as a tool of subjugation throughout history and bible-quoting conservative preachers, the Crusades, the Spanish […]

Allyson 46 x 25

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Drawing designed in 60 layers of colored ink lines but output via large format pigment printer rather than pen and ink.