I Hate Titles, But With Out The Title This Image Is Pretty Opaque To Most People As To What The Heck

I hate titles, but with out the title this image is pretty opaque to most people as to what the heck I'm getting at. I take full responsibility for that failing even as I consider this piece a success. like many of my works the image itself addresses valid ideas I had received in critique, they were to the effect that: there needed to be a greater depth of field in my works, that my compositions and my images needed greater complexity and that occasionally putting more emphasis on the environment over the characters would bring a greater variance in my show as a whole and thus keep tings from getting monotonous.

"They Objected On Principle To Savages Of All Kinds"

this of course refers to the grotto of mermaids, which includes our original mermaid from earlier in the sequence. where once deer girl may have been a welcome outsider here her association with the wolves and her participation in an act of semi-canibalisim, (note bloody/inky hands) has not made them happy. the one with the braid is actively repulsed and angry at the presence of the wolf who snarls in response, the others are more passive and less invested in the action.

the textures and creating the environment of a water-beaten grotto with the look of local sandstone was an excellent challenge for me, the false printing in the sky gives an impression of light but present clouds or wind, and although the waterfall looks a little "furry" I like it, the composition is as always as stilted and formulaic as kubuki theater, but with more to play around with in terms of details, (note handprint on the rock) I hope this is less obvious.

originally made for a print exchange. I was the only person to submit on time, but my piece was probably also the least superlo (forgive me it was an early experiment carving backwards words and after having it pointed out I cannot unsee this mistake)

everybody loves this piece until they ask what gave me the idea, so fair warning.

somebody I know on twitter is a very out of touch artist, and there was a hashtag during the super bowl that was #superbowl, so they look at this in their "trending topics" feed for the day and tweet, "I feel like I'm missing something, what the heck is this Superb Owl everyone is talking about?"

tadah.

so these are from my "Fish Phase" it's a red rockfish and a sculpin done in hardground, softground and auqatint. the thing I like the most about this is the sculpin's little spot scales, the whole thing was an experiment and it evolved over the course of the class.

I made this, and then I saw some works by Thomas Wood and I felt very in awe and quite  inadequate, but heck, he's been at it longer than I have, so it's ok.

Brianna's Got Her Gun. Stone Lithography for Ben Moreau's lithography class 2011 at WWU.

Goddamn I hate lithography. I have no patience for a medium that precludes sketching and re-working, which you may find amusing as I am happily hacking away at another block of irrepareable linoleum. but by the time I'm carving a block I know about exactly what I want the lines on it to do and where the spot-darks and highlights are going to dance with the white-space-that-release the-pressure-of-dark and the false printing that makes the whites human again.

I'm not sure if I can explain putting whites in to release pressure, but the idea that that was why I was doing it already, came out of learning about PNW native art which uses that principle to keep things from getting too heavy. not sure how else I can explain it with out looking like a person pointing at pictures tacked to my wall and linked by string.

anyway, this iconic-as-all-hell image was originally, and best, as a photograph my uncle took of my cousin in her prom dress. this image was apparently helpful in my entrance into the BFA program because Garth liked it. but, man I hate lithography.

hate it.

so, this is deer girl drinking from a stream, she's probably going to get giardia like that, but this is a fantasy universe and the bit where she makes tea requires a teapot and the standard Mrs. Beaver's Sewing Machine Problem starts all over again.

not that a lot of where this is happening isn't basically Narnia. because it is, but it's interregnum Narnia, (between human kingdoms) or at least narnia with a lot more grey zones than the books had, and laid over a local landscape, not an english one. but the archetype of the primeval forest where animals and trees talk is a really old archetype so I don't feel bad stealing it.

I just want to say those are really good legs, I'm still happy with them. I try my best to make deer girl look like her feet actually take her weight, which can be a problem when drawing any digitade bi-pedal creature. the human foot is plantigrade for a reason.

also that ear, man I love the little details, a lot of this is bad, but it has the seeds of better stuff within it.

I made enough of these to give one to each member of the Pigeon Vision Collective (here depicted baked into a cozy pigeon pie) and still keep one for myself.