So These Are From My "Fish Phase" It's A Red Rockfish And A Sculpin Done In Hardground, Softground And

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.

stole the idea from Christine, who still did it much better than me in her use of the phrase "don't sweat the technique" although I feel I'm taking the phrase more literally than she did. you will notice my backwards letter "N"s all over the place, (even carefully done as still backwards on the depicted block in my hand)  and my left hand depicted as covered in bandages, and the numerous weird printing errors that appeared on every use of this block.

it is a print about how I really ought to sweat the technique a little more.

it is a print of me, holding a speedball carving tool and the block that I will carve to become this very image of me. Recursion! and the block within a block is holding a little print but the resolution breaks down pretty fast even though I wished to imply it was this image again.

it was done for fun. I regret nothing.

so, in my life I am both the eldest sister of two, and one of two hulkingly larger step sisters. there is no good fairytale about a person in my situation in life. eldest daughters either don't do shit, fail and are cursed, or die horribly.

this is because with large families the youngest is an ever shifting downward slope of kids who get less and less parental attention. they need to feel they have a chance at one-upping somebody in life because what else have they got?

anyways, I've also got kind of a mouth on me, I swear and I say the thing that everybody is thinking but nobody else is going to say because it would be rude or awkward. but if stuff like that is kept inside it helps absolutely nobody, so I'm all about living above board and straightforwardly, and while I don't lie, I can't keep a secret either.

it just all comes out at once.

this was made as a solarplate intaglio image, that means the original image was drawn in pencil on a piece of semi transparent drafting film (allowing me one again to utilize a photograph and trace it out) this film was then applied and used to expose the solarplate through a UV light. the solarplate then washed out and was printed the same as a normal intaglio. I did not know at the time that with this process I did not have to crosshatch. oh well.

this slide show is about my progress putting together my fish drawing. these photos were taken over time as I worked to make the tedium of a million little textures more interesting.

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.

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.