"she Hung, Caught By The Vines"

"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.

so, I made exactly two of these. they were printed and carved in a flurry of last minute effort when I was putting together my BFA portfolio. I figured if there was one thing my portfolio needed (aside from more block prints to fill it out) it was a prayer.

I gave one of the prints to the European art history professor Carol Jansen, I think she liked it.

to give credit where credit is due, Christine took the block off my hands when I was in the drawing stage (when I was nearly done with the drawing stage I might add) and re-drew it for me. I gratefully carved her work and it is my carving and my printing but this piece was definitely a collaboration, I would have been lost otherwise.

obviously it is a copy of The Praying Hands byAlbrecht Dürer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Duerer-Prayer.jpg

the title is "good time management" I have also called it "Kate vs. Kate" this was the first thing I made when I stopped making art of fish, it was inspired by how motivated I felt after the McNett Event when I got to smash a giant pinata as part of a giant howling mob.

(seriously, we'll get there with the deer girl prints, I just have to get there, gotta build up to a crescendo like that)

anyways, the dueling self portraits were made by first photographing myself on a computer downstairs with the PhotoBooth application, then printing them out, applying red iron oxide to the back and tracing them onto the asphaltum of the plate. so there you go, that's why the look so good despite my inferior drafting skills.

the hat and the knife, the fangs and the snake hair are of course made up elements worked into the figures, everything else is the days (more like nights) I spent aquatinting both my black and red plates.

I gave one of these to Spike, and I'm still really happy about that. I have one left and I think I'm keeping it, it would mean so very little to anybody else.

this is a two color jigsaw-print made from the better elements of my second print, and the better fish from my first one. the plates were cut to fit each other and then the black background was inked and fitted into a jig, the fish was inked in a dark red and then fitted into place and the whole thing was printed together.

I only made one of these because it was a hassle and I mostly wanted to see if it could be done. it stands as a good example of my fish-phase.

so begins the uploading of the pictures I take with the computer's camera of the art I make.

this is from a request heard from a few of you, no wait, all of you. a unanimous grandma wish to see more of my art. well there you go.

it is playing as a slideshow. if you want to stop it so you can look at a particular picture look at the bottom right of the picture-window. it has a little three button control pad. click once on in the middle that looks like a pause button (looks like this: ||  ) to stop the slide show, click it again so it looks like a triangle to make it go again.

the other buttons select forward and back.

I know this sounds like I'm being too explanatory, you are all on the internet, you are all grownups, I just want you guys to know how to use this blog so you can see the cool stuff I'm posting for you.

ok, so this piece is one that I am still fairly proud of, it is just a printed digital photograph of me man-handling a bright orange saddleback gunnel, but I managed an edition of six and no major fuckups and that's pretty big for me.

you can't really hold these guys, they have to want to hang out on your hand, but they're pretty friendly and so they did want to hang out on me fairly often when we cleaned the tanks, although I don't think Noel my boss was too happy with me sticking my hand in the tank and taking this shot.

interesting note, I was a good volunteer at the marine Life Center partly because my hands do not get cold very fast so I could spent a lot of time with my hands in the tanks, either holding fish for visitors to pet, or more often whilst cleaning tanks.

back on topic, this print was my first exposure to using CMYK processes, the image itself was a digital image, which was split into CMYK channels (I used vibrance and some other things to beef up the colors first, it was a little more dull originally and I was worried about that getting muddy and lost)  and then each channel was made into it's own individual image, and converted into a bitmap to make it into ben-day dots each image with a particular orientation of dots so that they did not overlap but were next to one another. this was then printed via laser printer onto four plastic sheets and then ink was applied to the sheets and then the paper through a process marginally resembling lithography.

the ink on each plate only stuck to the places where there was already black toner, and I learned that in printing CMYK is both a description of the inks used, and the order in which they must be applied. cyan is darker/more visible, than magenta or process yellow, and so putting it down first allows the printmaker to align the subsequent colors more easily.

because I managed to do every step correctly and accounted well for my time this was one of the best of these in my class, which is a surprise, because any of the photography students could have (I hope anyway) crapped out a better color photograph in their sleep, they all however, opted to get creative in their process.

if there is a thing I have learned as a printmaker it is this thing, trust your process and be diligent. I can't always do it, but I think I did ok here.