Did some more printing for this project last night. Made a few proofs of my sun dude. Just the first two layers--ran out of time. So far so good though. Also jerry rigged a registration device to do this 3 color linocut onto the big paper. Gonna spraypaint some white onto the sky so the sun shows up. Started my own line of one of a kind overprint tees, too :)







Also, if you haven't seen this animation yet, take a few minutes and watch it; it's amazing.


-P.

So, I *tried* to make Christmas cards this year, and, in fact, I did make some. The results were... well, I guess it depends on what you like, lol.



I planned to make them with spraypaint and cut stencils. I hadn't done it before, so I wasn't sure what substrate to use. I thought some illustration board I had lying around would be sturdy enough, so I drew up the images and cut them out. They looked pretty good. So, I got my buddies Austin and TJ to come over one night and help me do them up.


We got started and things went ok until the first problems arose. Once the board got wet, it warped pretty bad, which made the edges of the image fuzzy and shadowed. Also, since a shit-ton of wet paint was accumulating on the surface of the board, it started to drip down through the stencils onto the cards in ugly gray splotches. Then even later, some of the finer details of the stencils began to break away from the board, leaving holes where I didn't want them. I was pretty unhappy about it at first, but more recently, I've been able to admit that the shadowing probably makes the images look a hell of a lot more interesting. I guess I got attached to a certain outcome and forgot that sometimes in art you've just gotta let things happen.


After a while we called it a night. The cards were half done; they had either an inside or an outside, but not both. My stencils were pretty much toast, so I decided to screenprint the insides. I decided to give the cut stencil method another try. I re-cut my stencils, out of acetate this time, taped them to the bottom of my crappy little speedball screens, and went to town. Heh, the results weren't much better than the spraypaint. The softness of the squeegee, the low mesh count of the screen and the frigging stencil method itself conspired to create splotchy prints with bubbly looking ink. But, some of them did look cool. And, I even got to use some metallic silver and gold ink I got when Davis Design went out of business in Greensboro.


Umm... I guess I could include these, too. This is the other card that almost was. I really wasn't feeling the Christmas spirit this year, and kind of wanted to make the anti-christmas card. Well... a card that didn't look or feel like a christmas card. Heh, I really liked the stoplight and smoke thing because it was just so damned enigmatic, but I was never satisfied enough with it to commit it to a screen. Oh, the text means 'happy holidays' in Russian.


So, even if I wasn't totally satisfied with the results, I had a blast with the whole process, and learned some new techniques to use in the future. And, I also got these. These are the actual physical stencils we used to make the cards. The way the paint dried on them, they look amazing! One of these days (or weekends more likely) I want to frame them.


And with that, dear friends, I have talked too much, when these images alone should have been more than enough to say: Merry Christmas.


-P.

You should watch this. You may find yourself angry. Ganked from flemco.


Now, for some media which is a little more uplifting, I give you:

Teabirds. Just beautiful women drinking tea :)

OMG HOLY CRAP AWESOME STEAMPUNK KEYBOARD!!!!

Laser Pointer Graffiti.

All brought to you by.... BoingBoing.

Peace!
-P.

Let me first say right off the bat, THIS IS NOT MY ARTWORK!!!!! These four plates, measuring 6x9" are from an etching class a few semesters ago. They were left in the etching studio for someone to recycle. At the end of last semester they were still unclaimed and were going to be thrown away. I thought the designs in them were interesting so I took them. When I got into the new etching studio the first thing I did was print them up to see what they looked like. I was going to print them in blue-black only, but then started thinking about how colourful a big tag like this would usually be on a city wall, and decided to do them up in full colour. They came out ok; they'd look better if I'd done viscosity printing. Anyway, I think this was a good way to get warmed up for the semester :)

My own art coming soon :)
-P.

It's graffiti, but cooler.


-P.