Antlers - Tumblr Posts

Hiroko (sketch/concept)

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Coloured sketch of a troll, made with markers.. :B

Sacramento Guest Bedroom Image of a medium-sized eclectic guest bedroom with a concrete floor, white walls, and no fireplace

Traditional Family Room - Open Inspiration for a huge timeless open concept concrete floor game room remodel with a media wall, a standard fireplace and a stone fireplace

Power Outage #96 You Are Very Deer To Me

Power Outage #97 You are very deer to me! [Color Ver.]

Alternates Below!:

Took a day or two to draw some deer parts. Very satisfying and relaxing.

So story idea:

Take your "village of normal mortals adopt a magical/imortal/fae entity" trope. The fae child has horns/antlers. But that's not all, they have antler velvet! So baby has fuzzy antlers! Everyone loves their adoptive child's horns because look! Fuzzy! They can use the fuzzyness of their child to prove that they are harmless to any sceptical authorities! And the child is very proud of their fuzzy horns.

There's like, one person, the local hunter, who keeps watching the child's horns. We'll come back to that.

So years pass and the child is now basically an adult, they have finished most of their growing, and that includes their antlers. One day they wake up and look in the mirror. Their subsequent freak out wakes up the whole village. Everyone comes rushing to find that their child's horns are peeling and oh god whats happening to their sweet fae kid we need the local healer/doctor now.

So fae child is rushed to the healer, and while they are being inspected the hunter walks in, takes one look at their child's horns, and tells the healer to "pay up, I won the bet" so now the hunter is explaining how they know what's going on, the child's antler velvet is just shedding and this is perfectly normal for beings with antlers.

And while everyone is breathing a sigh of relief because thank goodness there's nothing wrong with their child, lil fae kid goes "wait... so I'm not gonna be fuzzy anymore??" And now they're trying to confort the fae over the loss of their precious antler fuzz.

Edit: part 2 electric boogaloo

so, this is another one with what I would consider a reluctant title, by which I mean I was reluctant to title it, even as again, the title is very popular among unfamiliar viewers. the title in this case draws the attention of the viewer to what is actually going on, where I though the image was good enough on it's own. oh well.

"It Didn't Look Tasty"

refers to the dead and presumably previously masticated rabbit in her hand. (note to art people, there is only one really good picture of a dead rabbit on the internet, and everybody who wants to draw one is drawing it) the wolves have decided that Deer Girl needs to eat it and she is completely unsure about this whole "eating meat" idea. she is inherently half herbivore, and even as she is half human, and knows humans may eat meat, but it's cooked meat. it is a gift though, and she has to accept it.

this is the first appearance of the wolves and originally I meant them to be a wholly negitive force of ravening destruction, here demanding compliance,

seeming to say "accept our shitty gift and be in our debt so you'll do what we want you to or we'll eat you"

"heck, we'll eat you later"

but I guess I don't do unambiguous morals. the wolves are a force for what I might consider the winter people, as opposed to the summer people, (which is very much jadis vs. aslan)  but they need somebody with hands, there is somebody killing animals in the woods, there are encroachments on their territory, and they need Deer Girl to pick up the lantern and help them to fight.

in taking a bit of their gift deer girl accepts: moral gray areas, and the need to grow up stand up and do something. she loses her innocence and her life from beforehand and is thrust into a conflict on the side of what the summer people would evil. she can no longer be just an animal, she must become a full person.

as this is the Call to Adventure, I'm pretty pleased that I can look at it and say, look, it references the Chariot Card with one black and one white wolf. I wish I could say that was fully intentional. this is very much what I consider the first Real and Actual Deer Girl print because it was the first printed large in what became a consistent format. every thing else before it, is a bit embryonic.

Edit: added a picture I took when I was working on this so you can see it at the penciling stage. I take these pictures while I work on the drawing part so that I can flip them easily with the Mac's photobooth application and check how my composition will look when I am done.

The Moths Were, As Always, Fatally Curious.

linoleum block print, edition of 3, May 2012 for my BFA show.

this is actually the last large Deer Girl print I have made, it is for a transition to another chapter in her story and because of this it doesn't really fit within the established antler-chronology (she has two antlers, loses one, grows new tree-antler, tree antlers bloom) presumably antlers fall off and grow back new. presumably I'm not that interested in being able to lay these all out end to end and saying here, this is the story, this is how it goes. it's better for everybody if I keep it a mystery.

I have told one person the proper order for all of the prints and the plot of the story thus far, that person was my BFA show partner Chris Popek and it was because I had every print I had made right there and we were figuring out which ones were going to go where for our show. also I think he asked nicely. such things could happen.

anyways, the title obviously has a double meaning of the moths we can see immolating themselves on the lantern, and a potential decision by Deer Girl to go explore the lighted cozy looking town. oddly enough I modeled the town on Bellingham even as I was graduating and preparing to leave.

when I had my show up and I was taking my tun minding it, this very cute old couple came in and chortled happily at all of my work and decided to buy this one because they liked the title so much.

you can't really see it from here, but all of those stars have five points. all of them.

"It Was News, And Like All News Worth Spreading, It Was Bad News"

Copperplate Intaglio Print done in hardground and aquatint. edition of 12.

I enjoy the process of intaglio. it is one of the more process heavy and yet also one of the most forgiving forms of printmaking. if I make a mistake carving a block of wood or linoleum, it is unfixable, if I mess up a lithograph in any of the million ways known and as yet undreamed of in the mind of man that there are to mess up a lithograph, there may be no saving anything. but if you mess up a plate of copper you can always go back. even if that means you have to hand-stipple it in hardground, or burnish it until your fingerprints wear off, there is a way.

there are some choices that are less frustrating than others, however.

the big thing that I have learned is you should ideally aquatint your plate once if you want deep dark blacks. even if you don't want them everywhere, you can always either block out and stage your etches or burnish them back, both of which I did here. what you can't do is get deep dark even blacks without giving your plate time enough in the etching bath to get the deep grooves you need.

etching for 30 minutes and then taking the aquatint off, (to proof it or whatever) and then reapplying your aquatint and etching for another 30 minutes will not give you the same etch as just going for 60 the first time around.  (alright, I just realized that this is confusing, so I made a little diagram in mac-paint to demonstrate my point)

this isn't something Ben went over in class, I figure much of the time he just expected us to intuitively understand what we need to do to get the results we want, once we understand what the process we are expected to do is, and how to do it. this is not always the case. I feel that a lot of rookie mistakes in printmaking come from fussing over your plate instead of trusting in the process and being patient.

so, there's my secret on getting nice deep even tones out of aquatint.

to get bright whites right next to them, I used a piece of newsprint and rubbed them out after using the tarlitan to ink it, and then went back in with the tarlitan to even it out if I hit a dark bit on accident. it takes patience and a warm-but-not-hot plate.

I took intaglio twice in my time at WWU, I would like to do more of it, as I feel that I'm just getting good at it, but alas, it is hella expensive in all possible ways.

even though I tried to make pieces that worked with my other BFA material they turned out too small and too subtle to show well next to my large block prints and Chris's paintings. here on the internet however they can get equal billing, and that makes me happy.

Carry On - Fun.

In the cold, cold snow.

The Halloween Thing that looks out from my house, keeping the neighborhood Trick or Treat safe.

The very first Inktober I’m going to participate in. Can’t wait to see what everyone has in store this year (`•ω•´๑) .

Run rabbit run

All things dead and viable.

photo taken by Christian Cimoroni. black and white.