Antler

Antler

12" by 15" Linocut print, second of the animals/objects series-thing

three little mice are nibbling on the antler, this is an image I pretty much absolutely had to do. everybody who knows anything about deer also knows that mice will eat antlers. one of the reasons mother can let her animal bones collection sit outside in all weather is that because of the resident cats we don't have enough rodents to eat them and they'll be fine. my grandfather made a left handed knife for himself out of an antler he picked up and it has mice nibble marks on it. also I get questions about "so what happened to that other antler? so here's your answer. eaten by three mice.

this piece also has more roses, I was kinda thinking about mom's bone/antler/tooth collection on the bullet-catcher under the rose bush, and I was thinking about being home. a lot of the time the plants are an environmental symbol. roses for home, ivy for college, grape vines for parties and bars, things like that. I'm quite fond of climbing plants and I consider them to be kind of sinister and aggressive (you would too if you'd ever fought back mom's roses or the unending sea of blackberries) even as they usually just come off as decorative to most people. 

I was also feeling like my ideas for the things that I do were under a lot of criticism. which I can either usually brush off or use constructively to make improvements, but this was the kind of criticism where I was just being told my art was worthless and I was just feeling like I was being ripped up over it. and then I was making this at the end of the year, so I was in a huge hurry to do everything and put together everything anyway, I had no mental-energy-spoons left in the drawer to use for my usual brush-off, so I just made some good art about it.

lot of the time that's all you can do.

Just wanted to say, I think your prints are beautiful!

Thank You!

"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.

submitted this to FuckYeahPrintmaking. but it's also mine and I made it myself with my hands, so I figured I'd put it up here and talk a little about it.

this was the third of the guardians series, the fox being crafty and devious in it's folkloric reputation is associated with the house of Slytherin. it's also, again, a bit more subtle than doing all of the house crests exactly as is.

the ivy that is crawling all over everything I initially thought was not a success, I wanted to carve out the background like that on the cat and rabbit I had made before, and that was unfeasible with the white edges of the decorative breed of ivy I picked. so leaving everything black seemed like a gamble and a lazy one at that, but I was sick and tired of carving those fussy little leaves, so I made little squiggles to fill up space and left it in the hands of the printmaking gods.

of course this turned out to be the strongest aesthetically, and consistently the most popular of the four guardian panels. 

My name is Katie Powell, I have a BFA in printmaking from Western Washington University.  My Tumblr is a bit of a letter to my grandmas, who still I refuse to “friend” on facebook, so they can still easily see what I make.

this is a fox.

That is my tool box.

on the sides it has two little slips of paper one says "you are a good person" the other says "you are a fucking tool" the bottom has one of my prints that says "FUCK" printed on brown paper.

inside is: a strop, my speedball carving tool, a couple of X-acto knives, what's left of the fancy carving set  I bought when I realized I was going to be doing this for my BFA (note to the world: never loan out your tools, even if you think not loaning out your tools makes you look like an asshole, nobody notices your name carved in the handles and they will not give them back) other things: my engraving twist which is unsurprisingly nice for working up scratch board, my scratch board tool, a lump of eraser, some utility knife blades, some mechanical pencils, some mechanical pencil lead, an eraser and an Altoids Small's tin where I keep my tool-bits. (I like to think of it as the Altoid's sharps tin) the box interior is also decorated with a couple of these silly librarian-themed temporary tattoos.

I felt like showing some progress pictures today of something simple. I'm trying to get back into the swing of making things and what better opportunity for that than a three day weekend?

I am making several more of these simple herbaceous prints to be ready for my show at Dandelion Botanicals in April. it always pays to have a range of prices available, somebody who won't drop $200 on a piece might still want something for $20.

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.