Pop Goes the Artist!

This is the full linoleum block print that I did of my dog Lucy. It’s actually twenty-five seperate prints on the same piece of paper, in four different colors. I like the way all the colors except the yellow, which just doesn’t have enough contrast with the white lines. That’s is a pity, because the yellow prints are among the most crisp. I haven’t done a print in forever, since sophomore year when I took printmaking, and I didn’t think I’d go back to it. However, it worked for this particular project and it was a fun change from painting and drawing. It’s tedious, though–I always forget how much physical work printmaking is. Anyway. Pretty happy with the way this project turned out, especially given how far from my usual it is. Since I did this on amazingly crappy paper, I got it drymounted onto foamcore, which adds a lot of stability and makes it look a lot nicer. (linoleum block prints, 20×30″)

This is a close-up on just one of the prints. Each one is 4×6″ and two colors. As you can see, I had problems registering the layers of the print properly. While I’d drawn a light pencil grid on the paper to get the first colors down straight, that didn’t help much for the second color, and the sheer size of the paper made it that much harder to eyeball. Oh well.

This is the stained glass panel I did when I took the class at the community college back in the spring. I’ve only just gotten around to photographing it and it still isn’t hung up anywhere. The design is not original, for the record, otherwise you know it would have been some sort of sun/moon/star thing. (I’m predictable that way.) It was fun to do, both easier and more difficult than I expected. It didn’t come naturally, that’s for sure. Stained glass, while definitely an art form, borders on too “crafty” for my taste, although I won’t rule out further experimentation with it. I’m considering taking a glass panel lamp class at the same place. We’ll see. (stained glass, 10×14″)

This is what I have so far on my reflective self portrait for portfolio. I still have one more leaf to do and then I’m going to fill in the holes with pictures of me reflecting in little mirrors. I really don’t think that makes any sense, but hopefully things will be more clear when I post a picture of the finished product. It’s in pastel, my absolute favorite medium, and actual size is maybe 12×18 or possibly smaller. Finished picture coming within a week or so.

These photos are of an art project I did sophomore year, in printmaking/3D arts, but that I’m thinking about redoing someday. It’s inspired by the the U2 song All I Want is You. The cover is at left. I used black matboard for to give the front and back covers stiffness, and braided black and gold embroidery thread for the wrap-around to keep it closed. I really wanted to find a good star button or something for the cord to finally wrap around, but I never found something that suited, so it just tucks. The moon is a stamp, since we had to include something of that sort to tie in with the printmaking aspect. I went a little crazy with the gold stars on the front; the back cover and some of the inside pieces are better, although I didn’t bother photographing them. This is the inside when you unfold the whole thing:

The white blob in the lower right hand corner is my toe. It wanted to fold up, so I had to step on it to keep it flat. This is a detail of the inside:

I really like my inspiration for this project, but I think I could do a lot more with the imagery in the song and generally make the whole thing more complex. The song has a ton of excellent, tangible imagery, so the challenge was to keep the piece coherent and unified. Perhaps I could make that the theme of one of the altered books I’ve been planning on doing forever, with a few lines on each page. That way I could have the freedom to explore each of the images seperately, which might work better. Maybe Lanciotti would even let me do it as a free project in class. The next one I’m going to do is a landscape painting of a view over the water from senior retreat, but perhaps after that I can try something completely different.

This is the sun mobile I spent so many hours working on. It was my final project in printmaking/3D arts sophomore year and I seriously underestimated the amount of time it would take. To give an idea: it started out with 2D cardboard shapes, which were padded with folded newspaper attached with masking tape (a lot of masking tape). That was, I think, then covered with a layer of papier-mache and painted white. Then I painted the designs on (and because it was crappy acrylic paint, it took at least 2 coats per color), and finally strung everything together with screw eyes, jump rings, and hot glue. It’s now hanging over my bed and for the first few days I was afraid something would give and it would fall on me in the middle of the night. I spent several months hating it, just because I was so sick of looking at it, but I like it now.

This was another mediocre project from 3D arts sophomore year, one that looked radically better in my head than it turned out. The way I originally envisioned it didn’t involve the collage background, but the project objectives included something about “representing ourselves,” so I felt like I had to include it. The face is actually my own–we made plaster casts of our faces (or feet or hands) and incorporated them into the work. That was pretty fun, except for the part where I scrubbed my face raw getting all the Vaseline off it from making the mask. The whole sun/moon thing was a big theme of mine sophomore year–these two works, plus a print with a sun motif and a fold-out book type thing with a night sky theme going on.