Three Wolf Moon, The Second Relief Print I Ever Made. I Had Time To Do This Because Dude To Snow And

Three Wolf Moon, the second relief print I ever made. I had time to do this because dude to snow and otehr problems winter quarter was too short for Ben to assign and teach my intro to printmaking class how to make Dry Point prints. probably a good thing because I was able to go into intaglio with fresh eyes and no preconceived notions about how to attack a copper plate.

anyways, I somehow had extra time even after remaking my original fish print (because I refuse to ever do monoprints ever again, even though that would have been a good thing to re-do) and I made this.

I'll be darned if I don't still rather like it.

alright, so this one is another one that was originally made, and still exists slightly out of sequence.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, 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

an older print and far smaller than my original ones, this was a first draft of the idea that deer girl has lady friends she can talk to, they are mermaids and inherently more feminine, I had toyed around with the idea that this is where the dress came from, an issue still unexplored, but everyone knows mermaids are naked, or they have little starfish as mermaid bras.

except, as I know from my association with starfish at the aquarium, they have their little horrible chompy mouths dead center, so that would be right on the nipple and a terrible idea. this is infact what these two are talking about, mermaid fashion problems.

the other half of the problem is of course that these mermaids (my mermaids) can split their tails and have legs for limited periods of time on land, so how would you have clothes that transition well between environments while still keeping the mermaid comfortably damp? (I think they'd wear rubber boots, because their feet would be tender and need shoes, and the boots would hold lots of water so they could stay on land longer without drying out)

also my mermaids are man-eating sirens. because my mermaids are cool.

"she hung, caught by the vines"

so, this is somewhere around the moment where Deergirl looses her antler, it's a bit of a getting chased into the briar patch moment, I wanted to imply she basically jumped into this to escape her pursuers and the tangles of the vines are both entrapping and slowing her fall.

all climbing vines I have always viewed as vaguely predatory, blackberry vines, grape vines, wysteria, kudzu, morning glory, climbing roses, ivy, and any plant that climbs and strangles.

I want to show a lot of moral ambiguity though, the vines could hold onto her and use her rotting body as plant food after she eventually dies, but they dump her on the ground instead. likewise the wolves could decide to eat her at any point, but they need somebody with hands for particular tasks.

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.