This One Is Called Something Like "Bad News Birds" It's Tiny And Crude And It Was A Part Of My Proposal

this one is called something like "Bad News Birds" it's tiny and crude and it was a part of my proposal for the whole deer girl project.

deer girl talks to birds, or more accurately she listens to birds. because birds know what is up. this is just a fary tale fact. I remade this piece as an intaglio but I think this one is still pretty good.

origin of the first bit of on the spot bullshitting when my teacher asked why she doesn't have any clothes on, I replied, she lives in the woods, you can't get clothes in the woods. of course I came up with a dress for the next one. one I still have yet to explain. oh well.

I still like the face on this one, it was so effing tiny and I still got that nose just right.

little victories.

alright, we'll take a break from the main deer girl stuff for a second and talk process.

both of these were made for the same project in relief printmaking, a class which I had not taken before, despite my obvious enjoyment of the process, heck, I bet not having the joy beaten out of me early on is what allowed me to like relief in the first place.

but more on the waking nightmare that was this class later.

the smaller cruder image was obviously made first, I thought I could get away with making an image out of three long thirds cut out of one large block. (spoiler alert: I could not) I used CMY colors to allow blending and then forgot to put any actual care into the image itself. this is because I wanted to experiment a little with multi-color processes before committing myself to something fancy that I was terrified I would have to hang in my show.

the larger and proper CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and Key means black because it locks the other three together) image was also a hellscape, but in different ways. I had trouble getting the four 1/2 blocks to align because when I transferred the image from the key block to the others it became mis-aligned. and because I did not realize this would be such a problem I didn't make enough prints to account for the mistakes and the misalignments.

man I'm getting stress flashbacks just sitting here typing about that class. hurrgurblurgh.

anyways, that christmas I gave my back-home friend carte blanche on picking out a print or two as christmas presents and Alex and Sara picked one of my messed up prints of this image which they now hang framed proudly in the entrance to their home. I have begged them to at least hang it (and the physical evidence of the shame and failure that it embodies)  in the bathroom but to no avail. they like the messed up bits the best.

superb owl print

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.

so, this one came pretty much directly out of my observable life. this is pretty much straight up a drawing of how Christine met her dearboyfriend Kimball. it was one of the ones I did before I was in the BFA so it also predates buckling down and trying to make all of them make sense as a story so because of this it's still kind of a one-off. what it does for an installation is provide context for characters that exist outside of Deer Girls immediate experience. also everybody effing loves mermaids.

I re-carved this one and re-printed it for my BFA show, in that print the sky is completely carved out and white and the water is black, this makes a greater contrast to the textures on the body of the sailor so he looks more hairy than lazily carved. the lack of a background is also has more of an impact with a deep dark water under bright white sky.

side note, I am still unhappy with her nose, I received complaints that a shirtless guy in a captain's hat looked "kind of gay" which I countered with "he's groping a mermaid, he is at least Bi-sexual". I also did much of this while zonked out on painkillers which meant I took a sharpie and wrote NO NO NO on a couple bits of the block to remind myself to only work on complicated bits whilst stone cold sober. like all things there are bits I would do better now, but for what it is, it is complete.

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.