Talking With Her Was Deeply Refreshing.

Talking With Her Was Deeply Refreshing.

linoblock print, 18 by 24, black and white, same as the rest of them.

so, this was one of my fall quarter prints, it's kind of an apology for the other mermaid prints I had made by then. I wanted to make something sweet and pretty and I wanted to put some serious care into the little foreground details and I think I succeeded at that, the background runs into trouble mostly because I needed more practice at clouds and mountains and oceans.

this print is also an effort to make sure my series unambiguously passed the Bechdel Test, but they're probably talking about boys.

the madrona tree above them and the blooming waxy-leaved strawberries underneath are both plants that exist around here shown in their appropriate environment of an ocean cliffside and that's part of what I'm trying to do with my mythological things. I want to take the typically euro-centric mythos of my upbringing and make it local, make it personal. I could incorporate, and I have considered incorporating, more of the native PNW imagery but I don't want to be disrespectful so mostly I hold off on it.

now I say mostly, because these are carvings, they are monochromatic and I do take some inspiration from the traditional formline styles of native bent-wood boxes. I am however, just using that as a way to think about composing and balancing my monochromatic compositions, not as a way to think about making shapes nor yet as a stylistic decision. I can't say I'm not apeing the content of native art though, because I am talking about a personal/shamanic mythos, and I am mostly depicting animals and part-animals. but both of those things are common world wide, so I don't worry about it.

DeerGirl herself recalls both the Grecian images of diana as lady of the hunt, and a feminized image of the horned Sorcerer in the cave of Les Trois Feres. other than that I bet you could find more than a dozen different interpretations of a girl wearing antlers on Tumblr alone. and things go in and out of popularity but images of my mermaids are always popular.

go figure, ideas are weird like that.

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.

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.

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

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.

alright, in my last post I talked about how I get different kinds of support from the people around me. my art friends are of the opinion (mostly anyways) that anybody can do anything and that's good art, as long as the artist does that thing with skill and care and can then explain why the choices they made were necessary.

non-art (aka: normal) people can be more of a mixed bag, they can't critique you effectively on technique because they have little idea of how you made what you made, and so there is more of a direct attack on the ideas.

my sister dislikes my deer girl series for a number of reasons, first, because it's really very hipster to have women standing around with either antlers on their heads or branches made to look like antlers. (I can explain that I'm tapping into the collective unconscious mind and the current zeitgeist, but this is dismissed as an excuse for copying an already unoriginal idea)

secondly, because they are self portraits of me showing me as a person who has stupid and vulnerable feelings. Kenz views this as worthless and self indulgent narcissism.

third, at times my work is either trite or visually unappealing and I am derided for being insufficiently appealing and commercial. not that I will ever make enough money at it and why don't I have a job yet?

my life and my work are thus deemed worthless and immature, like Freud who opined that the artistic urge ultimately derived from an infant's fascination with their own feces and the corresponding urge to smear poop on the wall.

haters gon' hate, as they say.

but credit for these two skulls goes to Mackenzie and her critiques of my work, I asked for inspiration because I was in a rut and she said, "I'm bored of your whiny bullshit. draw me some skulls or something and you'd better make it look cool" and lo, an idea did come upon me and I did make it, and it was good.

I consider these two to be a diptych, and the only complete pair is now in private collection. (so HAHA I already found it a good home bitches, ya'll can just be envious) I only printed two of the deer skull on the black before carving it away to make my colored prints, and one of them was destroyed. it's weird for me to have unique art and there is always a printmaker-ey fret that I should always have backups of my art.

the plants are aconite and creeping blackberry. the skulls are from a wolf and a deer.

edit: added some old photos from when I first printed this image to show some of my process