Alright, So This One Is Another One That Was Originally Made, And Still Exists Slightly Out Of Sequence.

alright, so this one is another one that was originally made, and still exists slightly out of sequence.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

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.

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.

ok, so this piece is one that I am still fairly proud of, it is just a printed digital photograph of me man-handling a bright orange saddleback gunnel, but I managed an edition of six and no major fuckups and that's pretty big for me.

you can't really hold these guys, they have to want to hang out on your hand, but they're pretty friendly and so they did want to hang out on me fairly often when we cleaned the tanks, although I don't think Noel my boss was too happy with me sticking my hand in the tank and taking this shot.

interesting note, I was a good volunteer at the marine Life Center partly because my hands do not get cold very fast so I could spent a lot of time with my hands in the tanks, either holding fish for visitors to pet, or more often whilst cleaning tanks.

back on topic, this print was my first exposure to using CMYK processes, the image itself was a digital image, which was split into CMYK channels (I used vibrance and some other things to beef up the colors first, it was a little more dull originally and I was worried about that getting muddy and lost)  and then each channel was made into it's own individual image, and converted into a bitmap to make it into ben-day dots each image with a particular orientation of dots so that they did not overlap but were next to one another. this was then printed via laser printer onto four plastic sheets and then ink was applied to the sheets and then the paper through a process marginally resembling lithography.

the ink on each plate only stuck to the places where there was already black toner, and I learned that in printing CMYK is both a description of the inks used, and the order in which they must be applied. cyan is darker/more visible, than magenta or process yellow, and so putting it down first allows the printmaker to align the subsequent colors more easily.

because I managed to do every step correctly and accounted well for my time this was one of the best of these in my class, which is a surprise, because any of the photography students could have (I hope anyway) crapped out a better color photograph in their sleep, they all however, opted to get creative in their process.

if there is a thing I have learned as a printmaker it is this thing, trust your process and be diligent. I can't always do it, but I think I did ok here.

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.

this is a two color jigsaw-print made from the better elements of my second print, and the better fish from my first one. the plates were cut to fit each other and then the black background was inked and fitted into a jig, the fish was inked in a dark red and then fitted into place and the whole thing was printed together.

I only made one of these because it was a hassle and I mostly wanted to see if it could be done. it stands as a good example of my fish-phase.