Deer Girl - Tumblr Posts

an older print and far smaller than my original ones, this was a first draft of the idea that deer girl has lady friends she can talk to, they are mermaids and inherently more feminine, I had toyed around with the idea that this is where the dress came from, an issue still unexplored, but everyone knows mermaids are naked, or they have little starfish as mermaid bras.

except, as I know from my association with starfish at the aquarium, they have their little horrible chompy mouths dead center, so that would be right on the nipple and a terrible idea. this is infact what these two are talking about, mermaid fashion problems.

the other half of the problem is of course that these mermaids (my mermaids) can split their tails and have legs for limited periods of time on land, so how would you have clothes that transition well between environments while still keeping the mermaid comfortably damp? (I think they'd wear rubber boots, because their feet would be tender and need shoes, and the boots would hold lots of water so they could stay on land longer without drying out)

also my mermaids are man-eating sirens. because my mermaids are cool.

so, this is deer girl drinking from a stream, she's probably going to get giardia like that, but this is a fantasy universe and the bit where she makes tea requires a teapot and the standard Mrs. Beaver's Sewing Machine Problem starts all over again.

not that a lot of where this is happening isn't basically Narnia. because it is, but it's interregnum Narnia, (between human kingdoms) or at least narnia with a lot more grey zones than the books had, and laid over a local landscape, not an english one. but the archetype of the primeval forest where animals and trees talk is a really old archetype so I don't feel bad stealing it.

I just want to say those are really good legs, I'm still happy with them. I try my best to make deer girl look like her feet actually take her weight, which can be a problem when drawing any digitade bi-pedal creature. the human foot is plantigrade for a reason.

also that ear, man I love the little details, a lot of this is bad, but it has the seeds of better stuff within it.

this one is called something like "Bad News Birds" it's tiny and crude and it was a part of my proposal for the whole deer girl project.

deer girl talks to birds, or more accurately she listens to birds. because birds know what is up. this is just a fary tale fact. I remade this piece as an intaglio but I think this one is still pretty good.

origin of the first bit of on the spot bullshitting when my teacher asked why she doesn't have any clothes on, I replied, she lives in the woods, you can't get clothes in the woods. of course I came up with a dress for the next one. one I still have yet to explain. oh well.

I still like the face on this one, it was so effing tiny and I still got that nose just right.

little victories.

"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.

I hate titles, but with out the title this image is pretty opaque to most people as to what the heck I'm getting at. I take full responsibility for that failing even as I consider this piece a success. like many of my works the image itself addresses valid ideas I had received in critique, they were to the effect that: there needed to be a greater depth of field in my works, that my compositions and my images needed greater complexity and that occasionally putting more emphasis on the environment over the characters would bring a greater variance in my show as a whole and thus keep tings from getting monotonous.

"They Objected On Principle To Savages Of All Kinds"

this of course refers to the grotto of mermaids, which includes our original mermaid from earlier in the sequence. where once deer girl may have been a welcome outsider here her association with the wolves and her participation in an act of semi-canibalisim, (note bloody/inky hands) has not made them happy. the one with the braid is actively repulsed and angry at the presence of the wolf who snarls in response, the others are more passive and less invested in the action.

the textures and creating the environment of a water-beaten grotto with the look of local sandstone was an excellent challenge for me, the false printing in the sky gives an impression of light but present clouds or wind, and although the waterfall looks a little "furry" I like it, the composition is as always as stilted and formulaic as kubuki theater, but with more to play around with in terms of details, (note handprint on the rock) I hope this is less obvious.

so, this is another one with what I would consider a reluctant title, by which I mean I was reluctant to title it, even as again, the title is very popular among unfamiliar viewers. the title in this case draws the attention of the viewer to what is actually going on, where I though the image was good enough on it's own. oh well.

"It Didn't Look Tasty"

refers to the dead and presumably previously masticated rabbit in her hand. (note to art people, there is only one really good picture of a dead rabbit on the internet, and everybody who wants to draw one is drawing it) the wolves have decided that Deer Girl needs to eat it and she is completely unsure about this whole "eating meat" idea. she is inherently half herbivore, and even as she is half human, and knows humans may eat meat, but it's cooked meat. it is a gift though, and she has to accept it.

this is the first appearance of the wolves and originally I meant them to be a wholly negitive force of ravening destruction, here demanding compliance,

seeming to say "accept our shitty gift and be in our debt so you'll do what we want you to or we'll eat you"

"heck, we'll eat you later"

but I guess I don't do unambiguous morals. the wolves are a force for what I might consider the winter people, as opposed to the summer people, (which is very much jadis vs. aslan)  but they need somebody with hands, there is somebody killing animals in the woods, there are encroachments on their territory, and they need Deer Girl to pick up the lantern and help them to fight.

in taking a bit of their gift deer girl accepts: moral gray areas, and the need to grow up stand up and do something. she loses her innocence and her life from beforehand and is thrust into a conflict on the side of what the summer people would evil. she can no longer be just an animal, she must become a full person.

as this is the Call to Adventure, I'm pretty pleased that I can look at it and say, look, it references the Chariot Card with one black and one white wolf. I wish I could say that was fully intentional. this is very much what I consider the first Real and Actual Deer Girl print because it was the first printed large in what became a consistent format. every thing else before it, is a bit embryonic.

Edit: added a picture I took when I was working on this so you can see it at the penciling stage. I take these pictures while I work on the drawing part so that I can flip them easily with the Mac's photobooth application and check how my composition will look when I am done.

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.

"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.

The Moths Were, As Always, Fatally Curious.

linoleum block print, edition of 3, May 2012 for my BFA show.

this is actually the last large Deer Girl print I have made, it is for a transition to another chapter in her story and because of this it doesn't really fit within the established antler-chronology (she has two antlers, loses one, grows new tree-antler, tree antlers bloom) presumably antlers fall off and grow back new. presumably I'm not that interested in being able to lay these all out end to end and saying here, this is the story, this is how it goes. it's better for everybody if I keep it a mystery.

I have told one person the proper order for all of the prints and the plot of the story thus far, that person was my BFA show partner Chris Popek and it was because I had every print I had made right there and we were figuring out which ones were going to go where for our show. also I think he asked nicely. such things could happen.

anyways, the title obviously has a double meaning of the moths we can see immolating themselves on the lantern, and a potential decision by Deer Girl to go explore the lighted cozy looking town. oddly enough I modeled the town on Bellingham even as I was graduating and preparing to leave.

when I had my show up and I was taking my tun minding it, this very cute old couple came in and chortled happily at all of my work and decided to buy this one because they liked the title so much.

you can't really see it from here, but all of those stars have five points. all of them.

"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.

The Crows Screamed Overhead.

Iinocut print, 18" by 24" black oil based relief ink on Reives BFK White (just like almost all of my student work)

this was one of the three prints I whipped out at the end of my BFA year. as to what's going on, you remember that Hunter Dude from before? yeah, that's him in a tangle of limbs at the bottom having his intestines eaten by wolves and his arm gnawed on by deergirl. 

one of the first prints I made of her, was of her feeling very trepidations at her first taste of meat, and that was the meat of an animal, and here Deer Girl is complicit in the death and devouring of a human being. but again, it's not that the wolves are bad, they're wolves. they have wolf morals. this carcass is one of many who have encroached on their land and are in conflict with their folk, and they would not consider it to be in any way to be wrong to eat any living being who is not another wolf or honorary other wolf. (and that one has to be earned one way or another, mostly it's a linguistic thing, like many cultures, my wolves will accept anybody who can speak their language and might respect anybody who tries)

wolves have carnivore morals. it's not "evil" just because it's different.

deer girl on the other hand, despite being half beast and half human, is not usually a carnivore, despite her human-ish omnivorous dentition. for the wolves eating meat, and the death of others is a part of what they are, for her it is a choice. she's choosing sides in a conflict with no winners, and no good guys.

the 21 crows are reminiscent of the "evil avians" in the fellowship of the ring who are the eyes of the dark lord, they are a jury casting watchful judgement over the scene and also clamoring for blood themselves.

the culmination of the wild hunt.

-

this is also a print I thought would absolutely never ever sell, it makes the rest of my cutesy little forest scenes look edgy and I like how it's composed, but I never expected to sell even one of these. it's not commercial, it's not cute, it's not all that pretty, it's about devouring your muse and betraying what you thought were your principals.

not exactly art for over the kitchen table.

I sold one at modsock to these really nice older couple who were absolutely taken with it. I had to keep myself from blurting out "Really? That one?  the one with all the cannibalism? I only keep it around to distract people from the more overtly psycho-sexual themes in the others. you can't possibly like That one, let me sell you something else" Instead I said "really? and answered their questions.

it is the best thing to have people buy something I made from my own creative soul because they love it so much they have to look at every day. That, o' best beloved,  is the heady wine of professional validation.

this is one of my prints that I consider to be on the unsettling and weird side of my output.(as opposed to nostalgic and cute which is my other axis)  all I'm going to say about the content is she's not actually asleep (note the one perked ear) and all of my symbolism is always puns.

you'll note that I'm not giving you lot a title to gnaw on either with this one. I hate titles. it's an image. supposed to be enigmatic. and if I spoon fed you all everything with words all the time you'd think you understood what I meant to say. bask in ignorance! that's what I wish to say with this one. antler-chronology applies of course if you wish to puzzle out where it goes.

anyways, I make art out of things I wish to obsess over. I need to grind out my feelings and slash my fingers with my #4 and get embarrassed over everything every once in a while to feel like I'm making authentic art. basically, I need to throw my heart onto the wall. sometimes I need to feel judged both for my art and for my life. I need to confess and to over-share.

the part of me that produces the deer girl images, rather than my old anthro drawings I used to do is about exploring that deer-girl side vs the old were-kate side. my usual way to react to feeling unsafe and unsure is to snarl and lash out be fierce and shouty and I'm learning how to do the other things. to ask for help, be vulnerable, and be open.

I like making art that makes me personally get emotional about it. something that can remind me of how I was feeling. to hammer an emotion or a moment into a block, that is an intensely meaningful thing to me. even if, and ideally if, it conveys nothing to a viewer.

this has always been the case.

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.

"She was the kind of person who read books at parties"

Intaglio print, black ink on white paper.

top was in the final edition, bottom is a proof.

really I should just scan this one, it's small enough to fit an office scanner, but I'm quite enjoying presenting these pieces as objects of ephermera rather than pure images presented without the context of the hands that made them. partly because the aesthetic impulse of printmaking is the idea that the image is more important that the object where the modern conception of high art holds that the object is more important than the image.

why yes, I have been re-watching Ways of Seeing by John Berger.

so should you.

on to process: this was the last intaglio print I made both for school and not. as intaglio, like most printmaking, is a bit of a bitch to set up at home. remember, all of these processes started out and existed in their day as production processes. they are designed to allow a printing company to churn out assembly line reproductions of pictures for sale to a mass market, this was true for Hokusai as Durer, just as much as it is true for me. printmaking is not a good media for a hobbyist to do the whole job of it every once in a while. it demands dedication and equipment.

anyways, when I make an etching, my process is to sketch it out on a piece of paper, sometimes I transfer that with iron oxide,  then I hard ground etch my general lines, then I go in and do one nice deep aquatint. I stopped out the sparks and the stars before I started to give the clean whites. mid-etch I used some alcohol on the smoke to the clouds to see if I could control the effects what had earlier turned out to be a happy accident. and then I etched it to black. after that proofed it, then worked it up and further controlled the smoke effects I had created with the alcohol by burnishing out the highlights I wanted.

mid-way through this process I turned it in for critique. after being blasted pretty hard for having a messy composition and having people completely ignore the parts I wanted them to pay attention to while being unhappy what what they did see; I cut the entire foreground out of the picture with the plate-cutter. I don't have an example of the picture before I did this, it was pretty bad.

this picture is about the beginning of my relationship with Seb. he seemed to like me, but I wasn't sure what to do with him. in terms of deer-girl paranarrative, it's about deer girl before she got mixed up with the wolves, not feeling like she fit in with the people who were supposed to be the right people to fit in with.

I feel like I can't entirely get a handle on how to draw Seb. (he is depicted as a part-animal person in this, but you can't see part-what because I haven't figured that out yet) I wonder if that's because he is not so good at projecting a consistent created persona, or because I'm nearsighted and somewhat face-blind. but, his face looks different to me every day. sometimes I have to close my eyes and hold him so I can smell him to tell that I have the right guy.

the nose knows. the nose always knows.

Intaglio Print, black ink on white paper.

another one I will probably slap on a scanner later on, as unlike a lot of my stuff it's small enough to be scanned.

you know what, no explanations on this one, and no title. I've been talking enough on my other stuff. just look at it for a bit and figure out what you think is going on. that's just as valid as anything I have to say about it.

made this in ms paint because I can’t print right now.

thinking about a deer girl zine.

getting the hang of manga studio.

Reeeeee-

This is a redraw from the app Monster Girl Maker 2! I love the app, and it's so cute! Here's what I redrew:

Hope everyone likes!

"The Spirit of the Woods"

What a lovely deer girl!! I originally made her in Gacha Life 2, but I did change a couple things around! I also have never really had much experience coloring colored peoples hands, I think I've only had like one artwork with the Cupid girl, so I had to look up a few pictures, but I think her hand looks okay, I just need a bit more practice!

Anyways, here's the original character!!

HRT that makes you grow antlers and sunspots on your back