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In the first semester of my senior year I took Serigraphy (screen printing).  I'm glad I managed to hit three out of the four major printmaking classes (lithography will have to wait), but it was a bit of a strain trying to manage this along with thesis.  Thesis of course was paramount, especially since I was on a team, so unfortunately whenever I encountered a hitch in my work I did not have the time resources to go back, redo, fix, or properly test ideas I was trying out - time was so limited as it was.  As result, I wasn't technically satisfied with most of these projects in the end and not all of the them will make it to the blog.  My first print went of without a hitch though!  It was a three color print on paper, edition of 10.  Below is a bit of explanation of the elements.

 

 Being in senior year where everything is about polished 3D work I was really dying to use 3D in a "wrong" way.  It was one part me not wanting to follow the conventions of that department for once and part sheer fascination with how 3D programs are set up to operate.  The starting point here was a poly plane that I skewed around the insides of and edited in an straight view.

 

I've also been fascinated with dither patterns, especially more recently.  They're very simple, but their occasional irregularities produce interesting patterns when tiled that in a way become a recognizable alphabet of gray scale.  There's also a kind of fondness associated with them thanks to computer graphics of the 90s.  This is the pattern for 35% black.

 

yeah, tiled.

 

The next step for me was to apply the dither as an image texture to my poly plane.  Normally that would be boring - but I didn't touch the UVs on it so they were still all messed up from me dragging verts around and screwing up the topology.  Consequently, I ended up with a pretty interesting landscape of pattern.

 

Running with those elements I came up with this mock-up in photoshop from which I made my transparencies.  The rest is process!

white out

Recently my screen printing class put on a show where we printed directly onto the floor in the crossley gallery. I had a whole section with these guys.

if - bottled

diptych on scrap wood. Left is acrylic gouache on transparencies, glued. Right is silver spray paint, ink, acrylic gouache, photographs that were taken and then lacquer transfered onto paper, and a picture of a wolf from a children's book.

For Illustration Friday, topic: bottled.

etchings

Yet another post/image dump from last semester, this time from printmaking II, aka etching. I really enjoy printmaking classes. It's nice to get out of the computer labs and work with some real materials. It's also a great class to simply try stuff out in and play with ideas.


My first project was my most ambitious. During the winter I looked at a lot of beautiful work from the amazing Charley Harper (including The Giant Golden Book of Biology). When I got back from winter break I started drawing these simple birds that became more and more stylized and streamlined as I drew them. One day at work I drew some clustered together on a post-it, which ultimately became the basic prototype for this print. You can see the drawing colored over in photoshop at the bottom of this post. This project print used a three plate color separation and aquatints (more on the process of this piece at the bottom of this post). It's an edition of 5 prints which are signed on different sides - as there is no distinct "up" or "down" to these prints as they can be viewed from any side. Some of the birds are based on real life ones including pelican, seagull, flamingo, killdeer, and kingfisher.



Next I did a series of portraits of my CA friends. This was induced by my work at portrait night during the first half of the semester. I wanted to bring what I was doing there over into prints and at the same time explore the concept of portraiture through technique. The prints are on a full sheet of paper (22x30") and the print itself is made up of 9 separate coper plates that are 2x3". After several experiments with ink I decided on a mixture of ink base with a touch of black which gave nice gray prints that looked almost like graphite. The extreme amount of base had the unexpected effect of yellowing into a gold color within a few days, which I came to like.

For these plates I used a process called deep etch where you block out the plate and etch it for a couple hours, leaving large areas exposed to the acid which flat bite. The areas that flat bite consequently don't hold onto the ink and mostly wipe clean, leaving some ink clinging to the inside edges of the recess which then prints. Highlights were painted out while my friends sat for me and then after the asphaltum had dried I went back in with a scribe drawing in more detail from a photo.

Special thanks to my friends who took the time out to sit for me!
Tim Palmer
Adam Campbell
Josh Garlick
Matt Sullivan
Gordon Pinkerton
Betsy Bauer
Stevie Lewis
Alberto Beguerie
Uri Lotan
You guys are awesome!



My final project came from looking at glitch art for the first real time. It's everywhere and it's awesome. Most of my time on this project was spend in research and idea development on the computer because I was so unacquainted with the genre and hex editing (another post to come on that later as well).

I find the idea of translating something that's not am image into an image file to display graphically. Originally I wanted to get a RAM dump off of a computer, but my googling around told me pretty quickly that something like that would be near impossible with my level of computer knowledge. So, I turned to other files like logs, but couldn't find any that met my expectation, so I ultimately went with notepad.exe and translated it into a bitmap image by writing he image header and then dumping the file into the body of the file and filling the end with the necessary zeros.

The print itself is made in the following way: I printed out an enlarged and photoshoped version of notepad.bmp on the laser printers and then lacquer transfered the image to japan paper by hand so I could get a more imperfect transfer. Then I roughed the paper a bit, taking off the top layer of the transfer in a few places, then I stained the paper with acrylic gouache. Then using a template I cut out the rounded square from the japan paper which would ultimately be the the screen. The actual etching is a simple line etching printed with black ink. The substrate, as you can see, is a cardboard box. I saved all my cereal boxes through the year to recycle, so I conveniently had quite a few hand by the spring. On each box that I printed on I pulled up some of the top layer of the paperboard in the lower left corner (the signature and numbering of the edition is done in a similar way in the right corners). To print I dampened the cardboard with a spray bottle of water and ran it through the press with the inked up plate with the japan paper square with some glue on it's back over the computer screen. Printing it presses the japan paper to the cardboard, gluing it, and then the image is printed on top at the same time. The process is known as chine-colle, and is really cool. I'd like do do more work exploring it's possibilities further.


This is what it looks like to make an etching. That jar has asphaltum in it. It's very much like asphalt and full of tar and all sorts of other wonderful things. Whatever you block out on a plate wont react when placed in acid. The acid eats away at the uncovered area and creates a recess. During printing the ink gets in these recesses and stays once the plate is wiped. Lines and areas that aren't real thin will flat bite if they are not given a texture through a process like aquatinting (we spray the plate with a coat of spray paint =~ 50% dot pattern which blocks out those dots from etching and gives the plate some "tooth" to hold onto the ink in those areas when wiping. Because my lines weren't thin I had to use the aquatint process to create then and so had to paint around all my lines and other dark blue areas. Doing that took a very very long time, much longer than I ever expected (about 10 hours per plate if I remember correctly, probably more for the first one). To draw out the birds (because I didn't have a draft made up separately) used a waterbased marker and drew directly on the plate. Once I was done blocking out my plate I cleaned off the marker and tarnish that had developed in a water/vingar rinse and a light polish.


At this point my main plate looked like this. I then applied the spray paint for the aquatint, and once that was dry I put it in the acid to etch for several minutes.


The etched plate looks super cool when cleaned :). Next I ran a test print of this plate, then scanned the print, and then created the mock up for the colors/tinting/separation in photoshop. I then separated each layer of color and printed off a page with all of them so I could use it as a diagram to follow while working, knowing what to block out, what to not block out, and to make sure I didn't forget anything. The red plate was extra tricky because I wanted two levels of red, a light, and a more intense one. To do that I had to etch the plate twice, blocking out all the white areas first, then the light areas for the second etch.


When making the color plates I would have to print the main plate on paper, then run it back through the press with the color plate exactly where the main one was to transfer the image to the plate. Once it was transfered I took a scribe to delineate the edges of that shapes that I intended to block out (the light lines scratched into the plate above). Once all three plates for the the blue, red, and green were made I could print them all together. To do this all plates had to be inked up and wiped and then printed one after the other in the exact same place so they would register. Because of the inks I was using wiping the plates was taking way too long, but paper wiping helped to pick off the plate tone much much quicker. Registration was such a pain. The plates, while really quite close in size, didn't match up completely, despite being cut and filed carefully, transference of images, along with drawing over them, only served to compound any possible error, plates and paper could shift slightly in printing and just to make matters worse, the plates actually started to warp during the printing of the edition. All in all it wasn't too bad though, and I was able to touch up a lot of spaces with watercolor afterwards.

notepad.bmp

Earlier this semester I got on a glitch art kick (which explorations for I used in my final printmaking project) and finally got into some hex editing. At first I just messed with jpgs off of google but then I really wanted to see what data files would look like translated into images. I really wanted to use a dump from a computer's active RAM but based on my googlings around that looks nearly impossible at my current level of understanding. I then tried to look for log files to translate but couldn't find any that were conceptually suitable to my project. After some deliberation I decided on taking notepad.exe (from vista) and using that. If I remember correctly this was done as a 24 bit bitmap. All I did was right a header for the image and add some zeros at the end of the file to pad the spaces so it would display, everything in between is just the hex interpretation of the program's code dumped in. At first I made it 64px tall, which was cool, but I noticed what looked like some pattern stretching in the top (ultimately, I was really hoping to find interesting visual patterns generated from patterns in the data) so I rewrote it for a width of 64px and got this beauty out of it. It looks like an actual notepad in the file! The artifact repeats at different sizes throughout the file and very closely resembles the actual notepad.exe icon. I was not expecting to find this at all, very cool. I have no idea if this is an artifact of the file's information (If the information for the icon is included in the body of the file), if this was in any way intentional, or if it is a complete coincidental anomaly, but it sure is cool. I'm definitely going to be shoving some more files into bmp form this summer and will be posting a much more expansive and probably explicative version of this post later with some of the jpg I broke too.

...back to packing.

print1

I printed stuff!

Inkless embossing based off of one of my monotypes



Collograph in oil paint, based on the tufted titmouse




Linoleum based on my experience with the quadruped walk cycles



Etching based on a water color sketch I did back during spring break after watching the Theif and the Cobbler. Same basic image, but with a different opinion. Done with line etch, aquatints, and spit bite (but for some reason parts of the plate had a really hard time etching directly with that acid....) One of the prints of this edition was pulled for the department's permanent collection.

ten cents

Exploring ideas for my collagraph project. I've settled on the subject of birds (not just birds but birds with dime eyes, specifically) but still need to work out the issues of stylization, color, composition, and application of materials in regards to the construction of the debossed image. At any rate it's super fun.

the man upstairs

Our first assignment in Printmaking: illustrate a narrative using monotypes and then put them all together in a book. I did mine around Ray Bradbury's short story The Man Upstairs.