With no clear notion of why, I took photos of my shadow a while ago, performed a bit of digital magic with them, then abandoned them to Google. The whole shadow idea has re-emerged once again as the USA is being dismantled and organisations torn apart by its Wrecker-in-Chief, driving them to set up alts, rogues, and shadow provisions to help keep people informed and safe. My shadow suddenly had pertinence if only in my own head, and so I took more photos and made walking videos to inform a theme for the physical and digital work.

Behind this A2 drawing in watercolour pencil on un-prepped cartridge is a series of photos I took a while ago of my shadow and to which I’ve added recently with some video material that I’m putting together to simulate a crowd – all of us on the march. Somewhere in my thinking is the notion of a silent army of people protesting at injustice wherever it’s perpetrated, and another part of my thinking is to invite strangers to contribute their own shadows for a huge piece of work that I have no notion yet of how to make or what I would do with it.

The video clips have their own soundtrack of crunching feet on gravel and I love it.

4th April. I’ve discovered I can fool my phone into disregarding its spectral adjustments by swooping it up and snapping before it’s had time to implement them. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help with focus or framing! Below is a series of photographic ‘stealth raids’ on the painting, aimed at finding the best of the bunch to take forward. Significantly, I had at this point, applied paint to the two other figures and as usual, I’m regretting doing that, so I’m thought-experimenting some inventive solutions to this, given time travel is currently not an option. Whitewashed and re-drawn with watercolour pencil as before but they don’t work as before because of the textures added by the paint and tissue paper applications and probably because the spontaneity isn’t there.

Meanwhile, I’ve taken the video clips into Powerdirector, partially removed the backgrounds using the chroma key, and lined them up in layers on the deck with varying degrees of opacity.

Headline. The best part of this piece of work is the video above and the sketches murdered by unnecessary artifying effort. Shadow Army #2 is, I think, rather better.

(c) SCH 2025