Cat Of The West,

Cat of the West,

(part of my guardians of the four corners of the world series)

edition of ~5 linoleum print with handcoloring

showing you all this one today because I have just sold my last physical print of this edition. (whoo hoo for cash! people like cats, what can I say) it is part of a set of four I made out of hotdog-cut halves of the large linoleum blocks I use. they were partly inspired by the houses of Hogwarts, the cat, of course, is a miniature Griffindor lion. this is about as close as I get these days to fan-art and it's pretty well removed.

slavish dedication to a franchise at the expense of your own creative imagination can be just as limiting as insisting on being absolutely original at all times. take your ideas where you can, and try to do them as best you can.

Crow, 9" by 24 linoleum block print.

This is the the last of the long animal prints I made and while I deeply enjoy the format because it looks so banner-ey and nice the problem is, that because this is a deeply non-standard size it would be prohibitively expense to frame it. such is life.

I re-made this print again after the first run and cut out the veins on the grape leaves to add more variance in line width and texture. I dunno if this helped or hindered the image particularly as the delicate textures being the main point of interest got a little overwhelmed, but not too excessively.

hard to tell sometimes.

I do feel that I should have put more details into the bird. maybe in future I can do something interesting with that.

this is also the most obvious of my Hogwarts related symbols. another thing that amuses me greatly

alright, so we talked before about how the relief printmaking class I took was an unending anxiety nightmare for both me and my professor/adviser Ben Moreau. this piece here is one of the reasons why.

it is an eight-color suicide block in an edition of somewhere around 15 depending on how many of the messed up ones you count.  it was my first time working with Medium Density Fiberboard (or MDF as I will call it) as a carving media, and my first time working with wood instead of linoleum.

lemmie tell you right now, carving-linoleum cuts like butter in comparison to this compressed weetabix wafer made of sawdust and glue. everything about working with MDF was painful and it did nothing but fight me the entire time. add on top of this, the problem that I absolutely could not come up with an image that I needed to make in color.

voices yelling at me at the time, both real and imagined, were nothing but tormenting whispers of "aren't you so glad you're working with wood now like a real relief printmaker? I mean linoleum is a good student media, for beginners, but wood is so much more professional" and "don't forget everything you do this year has to be focused on things for your BFA show, so this would be a good project to make a nice colorful centerpiece for the whole thing"   with a heaping lump of  "fucking up on this project will mean you don't belong in the program, you didn't deserve to get in anyway, and you're not good enough to stay, you do nothing but create filth for other people to clean up and destroy equipment in the process"

so yeah. whenever I managed to get a little sleep (and mind you this was also when my back was starting to really have problems as well, so it was hard enough to sleep) I would dream the same horrible anxiety nightmare. I would be in the print lab trying desperately to make prints and every time I did anything I destroyed everything around me and also disappointing my friends and angered Ben. I would dream of being screamed at as I pulled print after ruined print, each wrong in a different way, each fucking up the equipment in a different way.

I talked to Ben at some point about this and it turns out he was anxiety having nightmares about me ruining everything too. (and I did end up accidentally printing on the blankets, but they weren't exactly ruined [unlike some other parties who will remain Drew, who accidentally shredded a blanket trying to Chine-collé on the wrong press] so whatever)

for all that though, this is not a bad print.

the idea was a gift from Christine who is much better both at color and catchy titles than I am. the title is "she brings the rain" and is a commentary on my Debbie Downer tendencies.

Rabbit, Colored version, currently cherished in private collection.

(that's right I sell things)

"It Was Sad, And That's All There Was To It."

linoprint, 18" by 24" Black on Reeves BFK white. (so's most of what I do honestly)

the thing about this print is that I had it planned out before my dog died last Christmas eve. I was going home for the holiday vacation and I had almost everything sketched out. but I admit the raw personal tragedy is ultimately what makes this piece work.

originally I was going to have the "action" of the murder scene be front and center but I couldn't work on it without getting too worked up and in disassociating myself I pulled back the viewer too. I think it works much better and allows for the piece to be somber and calm. unfortunately this is another example of a picture where the important bits are often missed, forgive me for not wanting to go into too much gory detail.

things I like about this one: the nuthatch is rather good, as are the wolves, there are cast shadows and cast light from the lantern which is hung on the tree, the moon looks delightfully gibbous, and the roses as underbrush give the right feeling of a sacred and special part of the forest that has been invaded. I like this one quite a lot in point of fact.

"It Was News, And Like All News Worth Spreading, It Was Bad News"

Copperplate Intaglio Print done in hardground and aquatint. edition of 12.

I enjoy the process of intaglio. it is one of the more process heavy and yet also one of the most forgiving forms of printmaking. if I make a mistake carving a block of wood or linoleum, it is unfixable, if I mess up a lithograph in any of the million ways known and as yet undreamed of in the mind of man that there are to mess up a lithograph, there may be no saving anything. but if you mess up a plate of copper you can always go back. even if that means you have to hand-stipple it in hardground, or burnish it until your fingerprints wear off, there is a way.

there are some choices that are less frustrating than others, however.

the big thing that I have learned is you should ideally aquatint your plate once if you want deep dark blacks. even if you don't want them everywhere, you can always either block out and stage your etches or burnish them back, both of which I did here. what you can't do is get deep dark even blacks without giving your plate time enough in the etching bath to get the deep grooves you need.

etching for 30 minutes and then taking the aquatint off, (to proof it or whatever) and then reapplying your aquatint and etching for another 30 minutes will not give you the same etch as just going for 60 the first time around.  (alright, I just realized that this is confusing, so I made a little diagram in mac-paint to demonstrate my point)

this isn't something Ben went over in class, I figure much of the time he just expected us to intuitively understand what we need to do to get the results we want, once we understand what the process we are expected to do is, and how to do it. this is not always the case. I feel that a lot of rookie mistakes in printmaking come from fussing over your plate instead of trusting in the process and being patient.

so, there's my secret on getting nice deep even tones out of aquatint.

to get bright whites right next to them, I used a piece of newsprint and rubbed them out after using the tarlitan to ink it, and then went back in with the tarlitan to even it out if I hit a dark bit on accident. it takes patience and a warm-but-not-hot plate.

I took intaglio twice in my time at WWU, I would like to do more of it, as I feel that I'm just getting good at it, but alas, it is hella expensive in all possible ways.

even though I tried to make pieces that worked with my other BFA material they turned out too small and too subtle to show well next to my large block prints and Chris's paintings. here on the internet however they can get equal billing, and that makes me happy.