How Are You So Good At Lino Printing? I'm Trying To Self Teach Myself!!!!

How are you so good at Lino printing? I'm trying to self teach myself!!!!

Short answer: Thank you so much! I really like making all of my art and I've had a lot of practice.

Long answer: I went to school and spent roughly 6 years doing nothing but learning how to skillfully make art, how to know the world how it really is, and how to have big cohesive thoughts and opinions about anything given enough time to write it all out. College! I recommend it.

I spent a lot of 2010 to 2012 working on the pieces you see here on my tumblr and if they were organized chronologically, you'd see how much I improve from one project to the next due to the feedback I received from my friends and teachers both in critique and informally when I asked for help.

Printmaking is very process oriented, if you want to get better at the process: you should try taking a class or at least watching a demo at an art supply store, that way you can see somebody do it live and ask them questions as they go along. Ideally you'd get to use a press too, I may be stuck using a spoon to print with now, but nothing beats a press for making it easy to print big.

But, if you think you've got a handle on the process (hint, warm up your linoleum a bit and it will become easier to carve) the rest of it is just practice, and figuring out what you want to make and how you want it to look, before you try and do it, without getting bored because you over-thought the idea, or paralyzed by fear that the finished product won't be as good as it already is in your head.

The trick to that is also practice.

The other thing that allows me to create interesting art is that I had to find my center to know what I wanted to talk about in my art. I think everybody goes through this, you’ve got the tools, you know the procedure, now what? what do you want to draw?

Finding your center, your genius-sprit, your idea-particle detector, your muse, your omnivorous all devouring cultural trash compactor, or whatever you call the place where the ideas come from, is important, but everybody already has it, you just have to practice using it.

If you don’t have it yet, or don’t think you do, write out a list of things you’d like to draw normally, things you’re interested in learning more about, your areas of expertise (be they archeology or pop-culture hair styles) things you wish you’d made, things you know you could make better than the original, the things (or people) you obsess over.  What is the best of your life? The worst of it? What can you not stop thinking about?

The things that itch at me, the stuff I absolutely have to shout from the mountaintops, are the things I make art about. Sometimes if I don’t think I have anything I go chase ideas. I drink scotch with friends and talk, or stay up late until my feet feel too comfy and the birds are chirping at the sunrise, or I stare at the computer screen at my job and have a pang of angst and I keep a sketch book and I draw any and every little thought that comes into my head.

And then I do my best to take the little fluttering light of an idea and manifest it right. Sometimes I manage it, other times I don’t do as well as I’d hoped. But there is always next time.

Oh, and also.

If you don’t manage to print square on the paper, either make a jig to hold everything in the right place, mount it right  when you frame it. or use enough paper so that you can cut it square after the fact.

Somebody somewhere will love everything you do.  If you have something genuine to say it’ll speak to somebody. No matter if you don’t think it’s good enough or not. There’s no such thing as perfection, there is only hard work and being true to yourself and your idea.

Thanks again for the compliment, it means a lot to me.

 Happy New Years and good luck to you.

Screen Prints!

alright these are the three screen prints I did for Ben Moreau's summer screen printing class that he liked so much he said it was better than a visit to the dentist for a root canal.

and what else could possibly be better than dentistry?

alright, these are a bit of a departure from my other stuff. I was just not feeling it during the summer after I made it into the BFA program when it comes to sticking to my "theme" and making art that would be useful for my BFA portfolio in the coming year. it was my first summer in Bellingham, I was mostly crippled all the hell, and sick of being pretentious and sad. So, I made OZ Fanart.

the first one is a reductive screen print of myself as Glinda the Good Witch of the South in her costume as she appears in the first OZ movie. it glitters. it is hard to convey just how much these things glitter in the sunlight like fairy-taffy made of pink and shimmer but they do. I would have to convert it into one of those glitter .gifs to give you an approximation of how nice they look.

this print was made with reductive screenprinting, which I have a pretty hard time controlling because I am like, comprised of 90% sloppy mess. I still love it.

the second one is of Christine as Ozma the rightful Queen of OZ. I was mostly trying out all different kids of techniques with this one, the swirls of the sky, the layers, the bajillion million layers and colors and the fact that it could still use a pattern on her dress. the gold bits also glitter.

this print was made through transparency processes, both using clear plastic and ink/paint/cutouts to expose the screens, and gobs and gobs of transparent base to give the inks character and clarity. (note her head flowers over the building)

third one: A Tribute For The Wizard.

photographic processes and fucking up repeatedly by not saving my progress lead to the end result you see here, this is Ben as the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz being displeased by our offering of One Good Print.

as he said in crit "YOU MUST HAVE AT LEAST FIVE PERFECT PRINTS!!"

everybody in class except for the Asian kid we never really saw posed for this.

first silhouette is Jake, then Brendan, then me holding aloft the golden print, then Allison and Stacey.

this class was good times.

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.

alright, this one has a descriptive title so I'll just lead with it here "As They Walked The Lantern Lit The Roses"  which has the double meaning of implying that carrying light next to these roses causes them to glow, which explains why they stand out so nicely. also, I don't usually intend to imply that her antlers glow, but a lot of the time I need them to stand out from whatever is going on in the background, such is the case here.

so this was the one where I was like, oh right, the wolves aren't evil, they're just wolves, they have a different viewpoint and it's a wolf one.

this one was also made to address the technical problems of This One, as you can see I upped the detail everywhere and took time to light the trees with texture, futz around with all the dang roses, and put stars in the sky. some of my strengths are in my use of obsessive texture and this is a good example of allowing myself to indulge that urge.

what else can I say about this piece? oh yeah, the wolves are usually not male. (not that it matters, but this has been an issue when people want to see psycho-sexual themes in my work, which I do address, but not all the dang time in every one) it's a bit of a play on the idea of "Bad Bitches" or "Mad Bitches" or "Bitches Be Cray-Cray"  whenever I am using them. and this one in some ways is about being at home with my sister, who supports my creative work, but she is very critical of all of my deer-girl series.

the gesture of placing a hand on the shoulder of a large dog is a very natural one to me in my life and the fingers that dig into the fur is one of my favorite details. they are on an adventure together and that contact plus the eyecontact is a show of trust.

"She Was Not Always A Wolf"

18" by 24" linoleum block print, black ink on white paper, edition of 3, May 2012.

this is a weird one, made for my BFA show to add more drama and interest and less moping and psycodrama to the show. one of the first instances where I used and purposefully manipulated the false printing in the background. I like the implication that it's these whispering spirits or a noise on the wind.

it's simple and I like that, not everything has to be a giant frenzy.

christ but this is a bad photograph though. will be replaced eventually.

ok so, here's a piece that isn't up anywhere else on the internet with the possible exception of my facebook it's called "And The Geese Had Never Noticed Him"

consider it as a waaaaaaay out view of everything, I wanted something a little ominous, and I wanted a dragon, so he's there breathing out clouds on a mountain top, you'll note the title makes you as the viewer go "who's this personal pronoun? is there a thing aside from geese and mountains in this picture that I might not notice right away?" and then the waldo hunt begins.

it needs that title because otherwise the dragon is often completely overlooked. and I feel like I should have put in a mountaineer or two for scale because he's actually gigantic. oh well, gives me an excuse to draw more dragons maybe later if I feel like it.

that dragon really should be named Waldo, if I was a type who liked handing out names.