Monday, November 28, 2011

Monotype workshop, session 2: Chine Colle

The second session of the monotype workshop at Josephine Press I taught chine colle and viscosity inking. Chine colle is always a big hit, and even though I have a tendency to use the neutrals and muted tones for my demos, students always love getting into the patterned and colorful washi papers for their own prints. Anyhow, the night before this workshop I drew two skulls on pieces of washi, one deer skull and one marmot skull. Washi is so thin that it often doesn't stand up to erasing at all, so I just let the mistakes stay in the finished drawing. I also used the Epson 2000 we have at Josephine Press to print up some photographs on to some coated washi from Hiromi paper. That way, I could show them how to make an archival print that still has the collaged look of magazine and newspaper clippings, though, to be honest, I think my cat monster didn't turn out so hot. If I have time, I'll probably add another layer to it.

The two chine colle-ed prints with pre-drawn washi:



And here's a ghost (a ghost is when you use the ink left on the plate after printing,) printed from one of the previous images:


The Cat Monster chine colle, but I think it's unfinished:


And then lastly, I made this guy, inspired by a recent villain on Adventure Time, just to give a quick refresher on stencilling, the lesson from the first week:

Sunday, November 27, 2011

boygirl

I went to LACMA for the only showing at the Tarkovsky retrospective that I could make it to, Andrei Rubliev. It was just as long as I had hoped it would be, and then a little bit more than that even. Behind us a girl I knew and her mother spoke in Russian. I thought of the things that they heard that I could not as we watched the movie. Their mouths were the same pouted shape of the protoganist whose invented biography disjointedly was relayed. It was violent, implied, as actors had throats slashed by Tatars, clutching tubes to their necks so that dark grey fluid would pump across their white necks and onto the equally grey mud.



facesfacesfaces

Monday, November 21, 2011

Polystyrene

As part of the workshop I taught in Salt Lake last month (check the last blog entry), I researched what substrates could receive ink beyond just paper. Fabric is an obvious solution that I've explored extensively, but I also found that polystyrene plastic takes acrylic screen ink wonderfully

Here's the skeleton girl screenprint on polystyrene with colored pencil, cut and ready to be reduced in the oven:



An illustration of just how much the polystyrene reduces:



One of the issues I'm coming ot understand is that the colors intensify--the individual marks are moved closer together, so the color appears more concentrated after reducing the image.

I added drilled the holes into the pieces to joint the doll after reducing using a 1/16th drill bit, and added a jump ring and silver chain:



This guy reduced a little more, maybe because I left it in longer:



I used plastic adhesive to attach a pin backing, making the little acrobat a brooch:

Monday, November 14, 2011

Monotype workshop, session 1



Saturday, November 12th, was the first session for the monotype workshop I'm teaching at Josephine Press. We covered basic stuff, inking and stencilling. Here are two of the three prints I made as part of the demo. The skeleton in cat ears I finished by adding a blue background with watercolor.


Monday, November 07, 2011

Tradigital, 1

A couple months ago, I started working at Josephine Press in Santa Monica. It's a small press that publishes a few prints, does some workshops, etc. Josephine does a lot of "tradigital" work, prints that combine digital and traditional techniques. Mostly, theses are intaglio and relief prints over digital backgrounds. The digital part is often very colorful, which is taking some getting used to for me. John Greco, the master printer at Josephine, had me make two tradigital relief prints using photopolymer plates and digital backgrounds.


Photopolymer plates are also something I've never worked with much before. Light hits the plate and hardens the polymer there, so to work with it you make a negative of the image you eventually want to print, much like photography. I painted my negative on wetwork acetate using cel medium, but you can also just invert an image in Photoshop and print it out on a transparency if you don't like having to think backwards.


The relief printed image is from an artjam I did with my pal Trent Call, and the digital bit is a photograph I took of downtown LA. The paper is this special washi that's coated to be used in inkjet printers from Hiromi Paper.

Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Person | Place | Thing

I have two sculptural pieces and two flat pieces in "Person, Place or Thing" curated by Todd Smith, Brandstater Gallery, La Sierra University, Riverside, CA. Opening reception is November 14th, 2011, 6-8pm.

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Good Way

teadrinkercard

I'm so busy I think I may vomit from the stress, but, you know, in a good way.


teadrinkers