This Slide Show Is About My Progress Putting Together My Fish Drawing. These Photos Were Taken Over Time

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.

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 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.

"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.

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.

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.