So, I Made Exactly Two Of These. They Were Printed And Carved In A Flurry Of Last Minute Effort When

so, I made exactly two of these. they were printed and carved in a flurry of last minute effort when I was putting together my BFA portfolio. I figured if there was one thing my portfolio needed (aside from more block prints to fill it out) it was a prayer.

I gave one of the prints to the European art history professor Carol Jansen, I think she liked it.

to give credit where credit is due, Christine took the block off my hands when I was in the drawing stage (when I was nearly done with the drawing stage I might add) and re-drew it for me. I gratefully carved her work and it is my carving and my printing but this piece was definitely a collaboration, I would have been lost otherwise.

obviously it is a copy of The Praying Hands byAlbrecht Dürer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Duerer-Prayer.jpg

superb owl print

originally made for a print exchange.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.

alright, so this one is another one that was originally made, and still exists slightly out of sequence. I'm kind of ok with that because I just really like it. this feeling I wanted to evoke was one of finding people who like you, like having you around, and want you to have a bowl of soup and feel better.

I worked out later when putting these things in sequence and while working out images for my BFA year that the black wolf would have either taken her here to meet the trees, or on their way to where the black wolf is leading her they met the Trees. so that's where this fits into antler-chronology.

the branch as antler is a pervasive image when I go to look for other deer girl images other people have made. it makes sense, usually antlers are only for male deer. but for my own symbolic purposes I think of it like: previously she was wandering around unbalanced due to the loss of one antler, now it is replaced by something wholly new. the budding leaves an eventual flowers that are also taking over her other antler. again, this may possibly be a terrible idea. but as it is at the top of her head it can be considered a capacity for a higher oneness, not just between animal and human, but animal, human and plant.

well, that's the hippie BS angle anyway.

notes on making this image: the trees are mostly modeled after my friend Sam and his best friend Stephanie, they are super cool and Sam really does pat me on the head sometimes when I am upset and it does really help. leaf hair would not have been possible without the help of the painkillers I was on at the time, like many things in printmaking it was monotonous and exacting but all the more rewarding for that.

this is still one of my favorites of the big prints.

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.

the title is "good time management" I have also called it "Kate vs. Kate" this was the first thing I made when I stopped making art of fish, it was inspired by how motivated I felt after the McNett Event when I got to smash a giant pinata as part of a giant howling mob.

(seriously, we'll get there with the deer girl prints, I just have to get there, gotta build up to a crescendo like that)

anyways, the dueling self portraits were made by first photographing myself on a computer downstairs with the PhotoBooth application, then printing them out, applying red iron oxide to the back and tracing them onto the asphaltum of the plate. so there you go, that's why the look so good despite my inferior drafting skills.

the hat and the knife, the fangs and the snake hair are of course made up elements worked into the figures, everything else is the days (more like nights) I spent aquatinting both my black and red plates.

I gave one of these to Spike, and I'm still really happy about that. I have one left and I think I'm keeping it, it would mean so very little to anybody else.