mind to media

Curvy Aerialist rough t-shirt design

2011-11-20T13:48:00.000-08:00

I've been recently enamored with t3apot's fantastic circus shirt designs. I love me some apparel that reflects the art that I pour my blood, sweat and energy into on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, it's very rare to find depictions of my art that actually depict me- which is to say, a curvy girl-shaped person with hella hips and tits that continue to get in the way of my straddle up. We do exist, though it's difficult to find pictures of us because cultural discourse dictates that images of willowy ballerinas are more pleasing and acceptable to illustrate what aerial is. It would be really cool, I thought, though probably impossible to find a design of an aerialist that wasn't all impossibly long limbs and a size 0 waist.

One of the benefits of being an artist is that you get to change things like that.

This is obviously a really rough sketch- I literally knocked it out in five minutes while watching Blackadder last night- but I'd like to clean it up and possibly put it on a screen and print a few shirts. Making art like this is important to me, because I can have tits, and an ass (shit, just look at my amazing lyra teacher!), and MUSCLES that take me up into the air and back down. And if there aren't any t-shirts that reflect that, then I'll make my own.

Five Leaf Clover Logo

2011-11-11T11:50:00.000-08:00

Hey, world! It's been awhile. I've been remarkably happy and well adjusted and BUSY living here in Portland, which means I haven't been putting time and energy into making art. But don't worry, the crushing depression of winter in the Pacific Northwest is on the verge of hitting, so I'll no doubt be productive for the coming months of emotional hell.

Last night, my dear friend Claire rolled into town to vend at Orycon. She sells ridiculously adorable geeky accessories and runs an etsy shop as Five Leaf Clover. She's been looking for a logo/character to represent all the badass things she sells, and asked me to come up with something that encompasses steampunk, Star Trek, Star Wars, circus, video games, furries, and general geekitude, plus a five leaf clover. While she was doing some last minute jewelry assembly for the con, I drew up, inked and colored the above. I think it looks pretty damn fitting, if I do say so myself.

These were my original sketches. The initial concept she gave me was "chibi", which is a little far out of my normal drawing style, as the creepy big-eyes creatures above can attest. Fortunately, she then gave me Chainsaw Girl as a style reference, which was MUCH easier for me to replicate.

Mapping out a pose for the figure and labeling all the elements we wanted to include. (I made a few lists to make sure we got them all!)

First rough of the figure- too big, and too sweet for the look I wanted. As you can see, I replaced the lists of elements with "ALL THE THINGS."

And the final piece! From the top down, we have fox style kitty ears, feather earrings, a black choker, steampunk jacket, a Starship Enterprise pin, dog tags, arm warmers, a pocket belt, a Nintendo game belt buckle, a five leaf clover patch, vertical striped tights, a steampunk blaster in a thigh holster and furry boots. And a light sabre. All of which Claire can be seen wearing or selling at any given moment.

I'm going to do a lot of clean up in Gimp to get rid of the extraneous pencil lines and hopefully punch up the color. I wanted the image to be detailed enough that it could be blown up and have interesting complexity or shrunk and still be readable.

If you haven't already, go check out Claire's etsy shop Five Leaf Clover and go buy things!

Whiskers, finished

2011-09-11T17:53:00.000-07:00

I decided I like the sumi style of this piece too much to actually go in and do much more to it. I fixed it, dragged lines of black chalk pastel over my charcoal, and very gently touched in the eyes and lips. And it feels done, so I'm going to leave it like this until it tells me otherwise.

(Inclusion of my fishie windsock on the corner is pure, excellent coincidence.)

Whiskers

2011-09-10T15:38:00.000-07:00

Cats have obscenely long whiskers. Have you ever noticed? They overhang their petite faces like structurally unsound, delicately balanced see-saws.

One of the cats I live with was recently hovering over me, drooling, (as she's wont to do), and I got taken by the absurdity of these insanely thin long THINGS that sprout from her face. So I shoved her off me and picked up my charcoal.

I want to keep this piece simple, but still work into it somehow. I'm thinking about picking a single color, probably in watercolor, and working it in in shades. Or I might just define the lines in ink- not entirely sure yet.

EDIT: Oh hey, I just realized it's Caturday. Unintentionally appropriate art is!

NFSW. Shibari in Mixed Media 2, in progress shots

2011-08-21T14:07:00.000-07:00

I love watercolor.

Like, a lot.

How else do you achieve the subtle, rose-colored hues of a recently spanked ass suspended in the air? (Well, technically, there are tons of ways to achieve that. But watercolor- for me- is the EASIEST.)

I get easily seduced by working wet-into-wet, so taking the time out to update the blog is a good way to force myself to let the recent heat in the Pacific Northwest do its work before going in to do the detailing on her face.

I'm quickly re-learning watercolor, having not really touched it since I graduated last year. Thanks to the cleverness of past-Mish, I've still got my palette with a MESS of mixed tones and shades still sitting in it, just waiting to be used. This makes at least half the learning process- the messy, paint wasting part that involves mixing colors- gloriously avoidable.

My hastily constructed watercoloring studio. Really, I should clip it onto my easel and work properly, but then how could I check twitter while I paint?

A note on the blog: If you're particularly sharp eyed, you might have noticed I've made a couple of changes to the sidebar. (And if you're reading this on Facebook, you wouldn't have noticed anything, and can clickez ici to see what I've done.) One of the downsides to publishing on the internet is that I can't have a heavily stickered mason jar with "TIPS" written in black sharpie on the side. Such a thing would be useful right now, since I've got all of ten pages left in my sketchbook and a dwindling bank account. So, I put up a donation button in case anyone feels charitable and would like to flip a quarter or two into the "feed the starving artist" fund in the hopes of being able to buy a new one without straining my poor finances more.

In the FURTHER vein of continuing to feed myself, I'll be putting this piece up on etsy once it's finished for all of your pervy decorating needs. Exciting!

Teaser

2011-08-20T21:09:00.000-07:00

Preliminary sketch of a new piece in progress. Look, the lazy artist broke out a reference book! (Hooray for my housemates with more diverse libraries than mine.)

NSFW. Shibari in mixed media

2011-08-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

Well, I think this is the first time I've broken out the NSFW tag for something explicitly sexual. Hi, family members I regularly direct here!

This piece started out as a simple figure study, that wound up taking a pose that couldn't really be achieved without a full suspension. So I grabbed some embroidery thread and a needle and did just that.

The concept of combining drawings with thread is far from original- I'm pretty sure I've even seen shibari themed pencil and thread art before. There are some beautiful ink and ribbon mixed media pieces up in the aerial studio I train at that have probably been subconsciously pushing my art brain in this direction. I'd like to imagine there's a "connect-the-ropes" cardboard shibari book out there that comes with a few lengths of shoelace and reinforced holes around naked figures. (If not, why the hell hasn't someone made it yet?)

A shot from another angle to give some idea of how the embroidery thread looks on flat paper. I deliberately left the tie between the ankles loose, in an attempt to make it look as if it were hanging loosely.

It should be clear from this attempt that I am painfully inexperienced in shibari. I didn't even break out a reference book for this, even though I know there's one less than 20 feet away on our bookshelf in the living room. I'm a lazy artist like that, particularly when I'm scribbling in my sketchbook at midnight in front of an episode of Misfits. I've been tying people up in my art since middle school, to varying degrees of divorced from reality, but even I know you can't suspend someone from ankles, crotch and knee points. That's what drawings are for.

I'd like to do a few more pieces in this theme using watercolors, heavy-weight paper, and thin hemp rope. If you look for it, you can see where I mistakenly broke through the paper trying to feed the needle in blind. My subject was very patient with me, despite all the unintentional piercing.

A shot of the back of the page. You can fill in the figure a bit if you know what to look for, but otherwise, I find it to be a really interesting negative of the image.

Inspiration

2011-08-18T17:13:00.000-07:00

Pencil sketch from last night, musing about the nature of feeling inspired. Sometimes I feel like my hair could stand on end when I have so many ideas coursing through my head.

Fawn, bound- finished

2011-08-15T14:57:00.000-07:00

I ended up working into this more with colored pencil than marker- I still don't really trust myself to pull out soft shading with prismacolors, though my small collection of greys are subtle enough that I trust them a bit more. I've been slowly training myself to work up to dark colors slowly and lay in the quiet shading first.

Cleaned it up a bit in Gimp and put in that cloudy effect around the top of the image. Not exactly the glossy effect I'd really like to achieve someday, but at least I got some practice in.

Art production and focus has a direct correlation to my mental state, which has been set to "off" and "down" lately, for a variety of reasons. Paper and markers continue to be cheaper than therapy.

Fawn, bound

2011-08-14T13:56:00.000-07:00

Something I scribbled in pencil in my sketchbook last night. Very rough idea that I didn't think out enough in advance, so there's a lot of messy erasing and drawing-over-drawing in it. I want to go back over it in Prismacolors and lend some greys, greens and dark leather colors to it.

The figure is surrounded by roughed in thorns on vines. I wanted to juxtapose a calm and content creature with symbols of restraint and sharpness, in an attempt to lend some visuals to the sense of centeredness one can feel when at the focus of bound and painful physical attention.

I'm going to try to push myself to work into this in traditional media, then take it into Gimp and try to clean it up into a glossier digital form. I could use the practice, and I think I like this image enough to continue playing with it.

Blog aside: I tweaked the margin weights for this page, so some of the images that I think were getting cut off should be here in full now. I like stretching out into the margins of the page more, too- it feels more comfortable!

Self-Surgery

2011-08-07T21:44:00.001-07:00

Got whacked with the desire to work into a new piece tonight and since I'm in dire need of self-care, it started along the path of being somewhat therapeutic and introspective.

I've had the idea of a figure with a heart cut out in my head for awhile. When I still had a studio space, I had the idea for a full sized human cut-out from butcher paper tacked to the wall with a 3D heart-shaped box of some sort in the appropriate place that I could place things in. I can't make boxes, heart shaped or otherwise, so it never came about, but the idea stuck in my head.

I played around with the human form as a physical space for inscription and incision awhile ago in this post, "Parts of Me Were Broken Long Before My Heart Came Into." I'm worried I'll run into the same roadblock with this one as I did with that one, shading large expanses of the human form that isn't the face or hands. I never actually finished that piece.

Some initial sketches and thumbnails for the idea. I'm trying to find my balance between exaggerated and realistic here and it's a struggle.

Reminder.

2011-08-05T20:43:00.001-07:00

Every day.

Make something.

Write something.

Draw something.

Do something.

Second layer, chalk pastel

2011-07-22T02:10:00.000-07:00

I finally took a moment tonight to work chalk pastel into this. After a good week not allowing myself to steal the time to get into it, I finally gave it half an hour and brought some depth out. Still on the first, roughed out layer of shading.

Beginning

2011-07-14T00:40:00.000-07:00

More to come. Lots of thoughts and images to get out of my head right now, but I thought it would be good to document the very first and absolute roughest layer of this as I lay it down.

The Dangers of Sappiness

2011-07-02T21:19:00.000-07:00

This is a hastily drawn joke between me and a certain person, who finds it impossible to avoid getting sappy on me, which led to me imaging what would happen if he did, actually, get sap on me. (There would be blushing and a huge amount of apologizing, no doubt.)

Kabuki Make-up Concepts

2011-07-01T13:42:00.000-07:00

As I find myself doing more and more hair and make-up for performance, I'm increasingly convinced- this is an ART. And one I need more practice at.

My head has not sprouted so much of this unmanageable straw stuff since I was in high school (have some fairly embarrassing proof!) I had to rush my makeup so I could make it out early to Last Thursday (an anarchic, Burner-esque Portland street fair) because I underestimated how long it would take to find anything to tame my hair back with. I have not owned real hair clips in...ever. Thank god for the box of assorted miscellany containing bits left over from my elaborate goth fall wearing days.

This is the makeup look that the above grew out of. I came up it with for my (slightly ill-fated) acro and poi show in Sao Paulo that I did for Adrian and Diedre of Bootie. In a completely uncharacteristic move, I actually designed the look a day in advance in order to shoot a run through video of my piece, which you can feast your eyes on below.

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Sketches from blues dancing

2011-06-28T22:48:00.000-07:00

I'm in Portland! As you may have noticed, my art output tends to decline sharply when I've got an exploded tour all over my hands and am trying to make my way cross country. But now I'm safely landed, in Gaylord's Paradise (not a slang term for Portland, in fact, but the name of my house) and I have the opportunity to Make Things again. This is exciting.

Tonight, I went to support one of my oldest friends (who I seem to inescapably keep ending up in the same cities with) at a blue dance competition she was participating in. The environment itself made me hugely uncomfortable- it was like walking into a room where heterosexuality was so thoroughly coded into the action I felt suffocated and overwhelmed by straight people being capital S Straight. The close quarters didn't help much either, of course. I mostly focused on the queer couples and scribbled in my sketchbook until my friend was done dancing.

Text reads: "Planet Queer (is very far away from planet blues dance)". My usual coping mechanism for uncomfortable spaces continues to serve me!

Trapeze

2011-05-19T11:43:00.000-07:00

Another one from the sketchbook I kept in Sao Paulo. I went through a pretty difficult time for awhile in Brasil, and as usual, my aerial work helped keep me grounded (....heh) and sane. Sometimes, when I'm in particularly dark places, I feel like my trapeze is all that I'm clinging to to keep myself together.

In pleasanter aerial news, I have a performance in Manhattan this Saturday! It's this event at Santos Party House. I'm excited and nervous-I haven't had nearly enough time to prepare for it because I don't have a studio to rig in back East and I've been relying on the kindness of my friends at the Baltimore Free Farm who let me practice in their warehouse. Send me all the luck on Saturday night, and if you're in the New York area, come out and see me!

Set Phasers...to Delicious

2011-05-16T18:01:00.000-07:00

I don't bake.

Except when I do.

And when I do, it's because there's a damn good reason for it, like my hugely talented and excellent friend Heather Danforth graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art. I could think of no better way to celebrate this momentous occasion than baking a cake with a giant Starfleet insignia on it, to match her Official Starfleet Pin that she wore on her MICA issued graduation beret.

So while the other graduates were getting flowers from their families and posing for pictures, I got to present one of my dearest friends with a Star Trek cake that I painstakingly iced with no less than three tubes of icing before the ceremony.

It tasted of pure sugar and geekery.

And ACCOMPLISHMENT.

Heather, you kicked ass through all your time at MICA and I have no doubt in my mind that you're going to continue to do so for the rest of your artistic career and life. You're amazing, and I count myself lucky to have you as my friend. Especially when it means getting to bake you a sugar-bomb of a cake to celebrate how awesome you are.

Tank Genderqueer

2011-05-15T13:04:00.000-07:00

Okay.

Updating daily while in the midst of bringing a show into existence and splitting my time between four cities may have been....ambitious.

But! Here's a sketch I did in Sao Paulo, while watching Tank Girl. It's a gender ambiguous tank creature, who enjoys wearing hot pink tops and whacking things with it's equally ambiguous weapon thing.

It uses it pronouns and enjoys all things neon.

PS. Hundred and first post!

Metanol Recording Session 2: Brian

2011-05-10T11:03:00.001-07:00

Apologies for the radio silence- blogger.com went down for a few days, conveniently at the same time that I was consumed with rehearsals. Universe serendipity?

Taking a break from my shameless circus promotion to return to my last days in Sao Paulo, here's the second piece I did during the Metanol FM recording session. My dear friend Brian, of Catharsis and more recently, From the Depths, did a live performance with Vanessa on air and it was....brilliant. Transcendent. Shiver inducing. Over the week I was lucky enough to spend with him in Sao Paulo, Brian explained to me how in the cartoon version of his life, his dreadlocks are highly animated and reflect whatever current emotion he's feeling, so I made an attempt at giving them some life in my drawing.

The photographic art of the Wandering Dream Circus pt. 2

2011-05-09T09:21:00.001-07:00

In which Kevin Hollenbeck continues to be a goddamn photographic wizard.

We shot these in the barn on the farm, where I had rigged my silk as a cloud swing in possibly the tiniest space it's ever been in. I couldn't do much on it (and when I tried, I banged my shins into the sides of the stable) but we still got some amazing shots.

Before anyone asks, yes, there were a lot of ball jokes when the contact ball came out.

The photographic art of the Wandering Dream Circus pt. 1

2011-05-07T18:53:00.000-07:00

Kevin Hollenbeck is a crazy genius wizard who made me into a fairy.

He also made Nathen into a circus-y Peter Pan counterpart, turned a farm into a fairytale, and did it all in one night without lighting equipment other than two desk lamps and the sun shade from his car.

Kevin Hollenbeck is a crazy genius wizard photographer and he is made of pure brilliance and I utterly love him for turning two remarkably silly circus kids into something kind of magical.

(Full set is over on the facebook, if you feel so inclined)

Metanol Recording Session 1: Vanessa

2011-05-05T09:35:00.000-07:00

During my last week in Sao Paulo, I had the ridiculous good fortune to get to sit in on a live radio broadcast at Metanol.fm that two of my friends were performing on air for. I was armed with my sketchbook and a single fine point pen, and spent the three hours of sitting Very Quietly and Listening scribbling away at my impressions of the session. This first one, which was done during Vanessa's set, was an attempt to capture a little of the feel of broadcasting over Sao Paulo and the sense of connection with the city that Metanol created in that tiny space.

I filled in the yellows and blacks with prismacolors later, partially to lose myself in filling in vast amounts of white space with big fuck-off markers, and also to cover up my thumbnail sketches in the top right. The colors ideas came from a set of yellow and black speakers in the corner of the recording room and I was trying to draw disks surrounding the figure as if they were shiny black plastic speakers, to not-quite-accurate effect.

The art of the Wandering Dream Circus, Pt 3

2011-05-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

This is the last of the Wandering Dream Circus sketches I did during my trip back to the US- if it hasn't been abundantly obvious by now, I get suffused with creativity when I find myself in any sort of limbo with lots of time on my hands. I'm less enamored of this one, though I like the positions and posing that came out of my initial thumbnail sketch.

Drawing these has made me very sad that I don't actually have a giant moon to do aerials on (or trapeze boots that go to my thigh, or hair that actually looks like that). Being as the hair and boots are unlikely to come into my life outside of drawing, I'd settle for a Moon's Eye for all my future airborne play.

The art of the Wandering Dream Circus, Pt 2

2011-05-03T14:15:00.001-07:00

A second piece I knocked out during layovers when I was traveling back from Brasil. I'm not sure what direction it wants to go in- I like the sketchy pencil quality it has right now, with the line work. I'm always hesitant to add detail to work that appeals to me in it's unfinished state- I'm convinced (due to experience) that I'm going to pick the wrong direction to take it in and mess it up when it's still brimming with potential.

Ideas, internet?

The art of the Wandering Dream Circus, Pt 1

2011-05-02T15:22:00.000-07:00

OH MY GOD IT'S HUGE.

(I finally figured out how to make images larger in blogger.)

Now that I'm home from Brasil, work is going full speed ahead on the Next Big Thing- the Wandering Dream Circus, a project that my performance bestie Nathen and I are putting together for a tour in June. This is some of the concept art I knocked out between flights yesterday, and it's one of three pieces that I'll put up here as I scrub the extraneous pencil marks off them in Gimp.

That would be me with the hedgehog hair sitting on the moon, by the way.

The website and facebook page for us Wandering Dreamers should be up by next week, but here's a taste of who we are and what we do:

"The Wandering Dream Circus is a fantastical exploration of a world beyond our own, steeped in darkness and whimsy, brought to a boil under a bruised and roiling sky, and served hot with a sliver of moon and a wink. Using acrobatics, juggling, fire and aerial arts to tell the story of two night travelers who find themselves lost in a strange world of darkness and dreams, the Wandering Dream Circus will conjure up stars in your eyes, spark wonder in your hearts, and plant deceptively simple questions to blossom in your mind."

The current tour, which is subject to change, takes us through Phillidelphia PA, Baltimore MD, DC, Carrboro NC, Chattanooga, TN, Tucson AZ, Monteray CA, San Francisco CA, Ashland OR and Portland OR.

What's that you say? You want fantastical circus artists to come to your town, conveniently located roughly along our current route? CONTACT US. My email is hungrily awaiting more Southern venues that we can cast out spell of childlike wonderment over. Feed it with ideas here: mishkotek@gmail.com.

Espaço Impróprio

2011-04-30T08:13:00.000-07:00

In retrospect, re-starting my bloggery the day before I leave Brasil and travel for two days may have been a bit at odds with my daily posting schedule. No mind- space/time constraints have not slowed me down yet, and I don't intend to let them start.

Although this isn't my art, and my dear friend Ian took the picture, this is the art I've been living inside of for the past three months in Sao Paulo. Espaço Impróprio is an eight year old punk venue/collective/lunchcounter/bar and event space that is coming to an end as I leave Brasil. I've been incredibly lucky to exist within this space for the past three months and get to share it with some really amazing people, music, art and events. And dogs.

Fifteen minutes to go- see everyone on the other side of the ocean.

Back? Oh, I think yes.

2011-04-29T17:12:00.000-07:00

It's been exactly one year and one day since last I haunted my little artistic corner of the blog world. In those 366 days, I graduated from Evergreen, spent a summer in Olympia running my screenprinting studio, drove cross country, moved to Brasil for six months, learned to speak Portuguese, trained my ass off in at an aerial school in Sao Paulo, and didn't produce nearly as much art as I did when I was in college.

I am endeavoring to change the last part of that (although I'm also coming back to the US from Brazil tomorrow, so the rest of it will change fairly drastically as well). I have a sketchbook of drawings that are just waiting to be scanned in and see the murky light of the internet, so we'll start with those.

Hi, world. It's good to be back.

Iterative Self Photoshoot 2 (Electric Boogaloo)

2010-04-28T14:40:00.001-07:00

More shots that I'm using in my Iterative Self project. The loose concept behind it from when I was shooting dealt with performing the non-performative self- co-opting make-up to create bruises and black eyes, being aggressively unpretty, baring my teeth at the camera. It's coming from a place of reaction to all the time I've spent in front of a camera doing the opposite, more or less in the same vein as that "Fuck yer audience" piece I did last year.

It helps that I'm feeling massively overwhelmed and under a lot of stress right now. These are not exactly difficult emotions to get a hold of and perform here.

Shooting this solo, without anyone mitigating between me and the camera was really liberating. As was smearing fuck-loads of make-up on my face and emptying a bottle of water over my head.

Iterative Self Photo Shoot

2010-04-27T17:29:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the radio silence all- my current class schedule has me chained to the printmaking dungeon and I've only been coming up for air to sleep. My professors seem determined to break me with my credit load this quarter, and truth be told, they're starting to succeed.

These are a few images I took of myself for the iterative self project I'm currently immersed in. I was tethered by the remote shutter control, which is why they're all so damn close. The idea is to work one image through a series of processes, changing it subtly every time, until you go completely fucking insane and burn everything in your studio in a purging fire.

This term is really starting to get to me.

Punching yourself in the face with Photoshop!

2010-04-08T11:41:00.000-07:00

Back and bloodied! Well, not really, unless you're counting the scrape I gave myself in the print studio yesterday. I'm back in classes, taking a masochistic 20 credits for my last quarter, and making Stuff again. My last (last!) program at Evergreen is a digital media and printmaking intensive, so I'm finally doing Serious Shit in Photoshop. I'm slowly feeling my way around PS4, and today our assignment was to mess around with a self portrait.

Here's the original mugshot. I punched myself in the eye with the clone stamp tool for awhile and mucked around with the levels- nothing major, but I'm still beginning.

Final enameled pieces

2010-03-09T16:20:00.000-08:00

These are my two final, and probably most ambitious, thin-metal enameling samples. Not to be content with the only relatively unstable pieces I had made so far, I decided to do a ridiculously flimsy one out of painfully thin metal, and fire it about ten times.

This first one is all of my sketchbook scribbled fantasies come to life, namely, me on my future lyra. My class notes are messy with sketches on me on a hoop, it made a lot of sense to turn it into an enamel piece.

This was the last one I did, yesterday. Again, born of idle sketching and figures that tend to crop up in my drawing. I'm not thrilled with it, but it felt good to get one final piece out before I had to say goodbye to enameling forever.

Eye Teeth- Final

2010-03-07T15:56:00.000-08:00

Eye Teeth, in its final, completed iteration. I put the last coats of enamel on the mask on Friday, and created the barbed wire choker/title today. I vacillated a lot on how to display it, but I think having two white styrofoam heads on either side of the full mannequin is going to balance my final show well.

I wound up doing the nose bridge and the head attachment with braided wire (Claire's idea to braid it, mad props to her). I tried to keep it wild and organic, leaving some loose ends to curl around the sides and back.

I mimicked the wild feel of the mask with the choker, braiding it loosely and wrapping bits of wire around the connections like barbed wire. I hammered out the title piece with thin copper, so the letters are really deeply recessed. If I had had the time I would've enameled it the same colors as the mask, but I just hit it with some liver of sulfur and called it a day.

Side view- there are layers and layers (17, to be exact) of subtle greens, browns and reds in the mask, but they're mostly lost in the picture. I enameled the spikes of the eyes and ends with opaque black, which is again, too subtle to be really picked up by the camera.

Close up to give some idea of the colors that went into the mask. I built up more enamel in this piece than I ever have before, mostly because it took that long for me to be satisfied with it.

I'm really happy with this one as my final major piece of metal working. Tomorrow's the last critique of the term, I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else's been up to.

Enameling! You're probably sick of it by now, but I'm sure as hell not

2010-03-05T19:04:00.001-08:00

Following my tentative experiments with enameling thin metal onto pieces yesterday, I threw myself into it with absolutely no thoughts of how cut up I was about to get today. Octopods! Sparrows! Other iconic images that are easily sheared out of metal! The list goes on.

I initially approached it like cutting out stencils, but I quickly realized that because metal /= paper, there was no need to avoid going into negative space by cutting through connections. Which is good, because piercing and shearing out metal that thin would have been a hassle.

Doing the colors on the octopus was entirely too fun. I almost made it purple, but I restrained myself.

This one I made with my aerial teacher, who goes by Sparrow, in mind. The wing tips got a bit banged up because of the fragility, but it's holding together surprisingly well for being so delicate.

The Medusa is the first piece I did with two layers. I wanted to distinguish between the snakes and the profile, so I built up the snakes with a few layers of wetpacked enamel. I even left my transparent enamel comfort zone and touched it with some opaque to get the depth.

Tomorrow- this madness, in its finished enameled form. And meditations on the end of my relationship with the fine metals studio.

Enameling samples

2010-03-04T12:17:00.000-08:00

New enameling pieces! I've been working non-stop in the studio because this is the last week we have open hours before it shuts down until fall. I was too sick to put these up yesterday, so today I'm posting the first and second layers of these two little sets.

I made the freaking cool discovery that I could enamel pieces of thin metal to a base when I was messing around, so all of these are experiments along those lines. I cut the tree out of 22 gauge, and fluxxed it to the base.

Same for this one- every subsequent layer of enamel adheres it more strongly.

And this was mostly an excuse to use up my leftover scraps of thin metal.

Day two! I've done about 5-10 layers on each of these pieces at this point.

The tree turned into an experiment with painting on klyrfire in patterns and tapping off the excess enamel.

I wetpacked the fishy to give it some dimension, and messed around with creating a blue gradation.

And with this one I just kept fluxxing it to build up dimension.

Apologies for the brevity, my sinuses are interfering with my writing-brain. Possibly I will cast myself a new nose in studio today.

Eye Teeth Mask- Work in Progress

2010-03-01T17:48:00.000-08:00

This is my final mask for class, in all its eye-eating glory. I've been wacking at it (read: smithing) to try to get the shape right all today, and I'm fucking wiped. Also, thanks to all my work doing masks this term, I really hate noses. Useless, pointless facial mistakes. I tried to avoid the Nose Problem with a little piece of chain mail, but that still didn't totally solve it. Ideas, world?

It's still very much unfinished- I have the rest of the week to pour into it- and the way it sits on my face needs to be tweaked. Right now I've got a single-link chain attaching at the side spike and in the back, but that's not doing what I need it to.

The one element I really like and am running with is the bowl-shape goggle look. The eyes are very recessed behind the teeth/spikes, and it makes for a nice deep shadow.

One last profile shot because my eyes look creeeepy underneath this piece. All my work thus far in the term has involved on putting dangerous things by my eyes (sharp pointy metal, broken glass), but I think this is the only one where I've deliberately made spikes that came IN towards my ocular cavity.

I'm planning to enamel these, probably with a dirty, fluxxed white-to-red color gradation. I like the idea of red coming down the points, because my work clearly isn't disturbing enough without those implications.

Fuck yeah studio!

2010-02-27T18:39:00.001-08:00

FUCK. YEAH. STUDIO.

I spent all day today (for a value of today that includes being up till six, sleeping for two hours in the morning, training for three on the trapeze, and collapsing for a little bit after that) cleaning the garage so I could work in my screenprinting studio again. And it is beeeeeutiful. All sexy and organized and full of shelving!

I even coated a screen for one of my jobs to see if my emulsion from a month ago is still good. Here's hoping- I'd love to put some of tomorrow towards printing some real work again.

Here, look at it again! Love it with your eyes! Be full of delicious anticipation for the art that is going to come out of this space! (I have been doing a lot of that part).

Art space!

Naked people Friday!

2010-02-26T19:47:00.000-08:00

Not my best depictions of naked people this Friday, but I still dragged my ass out of bed this morning and made it to the studio with a few hours to spend on drawing. The first pose was frustrating as hell, and it didn't really mesh well for the rest of the session but I just focussed in on shading and worked it the best I could.

The little hand drawing says "can't draw today. bad hand!" I thought chastising it might help.

When I get blocked doing figure studies, I generally just zero in on one part, but the hands were coming pretty well so I sketched out some of the figure too. She's holding a mannequin head, so I decided to leave her real head out to balance it.

Last half hour pose, and I didn't trust myself to make it a single good piece, so I split it up into three. The yellow one is the most life-like, but the blue was the most fun.

Better stuff next week, hopefully!

Enameling=love

2010-02-25T11:27:00.000-08:00

Oh, I heart it so.

I've been making leetle enamel samples for the past week, all with drilled holes for potential jump-ring necklace attachment. One of my classmates has been making these gorgeous luminescent pieces with layers of transparent enamel, which encouraged me to try firing with less enamel.

The PROBLEM with enamel samples is they're so deceptively easy. I get lured away from my projects by the kiln to slap a couple of layers on a scrap of copper in the morning, and the next thing I know the studio's closing and all I have to show for it is these little glass bits and pieces looking up at me all innocently from my desk, next to the work I was supposed to be doing all day.

The back of the above, rocking two layers of transparent turquoise and starting to develop firescale because I really should have used more counter.

I was a little annoyed by my lack of foresight with the other skull (absence of jump ring for awesome jewelry purposes), so I decided to do a cloisonne one using my silver wire. Unfortunately, I put it in the wrong kiln without thinking and melted silver all over the damn piece. I cleaned it up a little yesterday, but it still looks wonky and matte.

Cloisonne-thulhu. The old ones made me do it.

This was the most obnoxious, finicky piece to finish, which is appropriate I suppose. All those little tentacles are hell to wetpack, but I did like leaving it textured a bit instead of all glossy.

This is one I did for my friend Wes, who runs the circus barn where I train. The text is from a tattoo he has that I've always loved.

And the back, with his name on it so I wouldn't be tempted to keep it for myself. I want to make a few more pieces to give away to my friends, particularly the circus folks I train with who I can really easily imagine translating into enamel art, personality wise.

One last one, a tiny ouroboros that I made with Shira in mind. I'm really pleased with how I got the cloisonne to spill over the edge of the metal and still be able to hold enamel.

More sexy glass metal to come! I've got another month in the studio if anyone wants to commission an enameled piece. Text (like the fuck love make art piece) is particularly easy to make happen, cloisonne is much more complicated and labor intensive. Let me make your ideas into artstuffs!

Artificial Tears- Final

2010-02-23T16:36:00.000-08:00

Done! Enameled seven times, affixed with broken glass, stuck on a styrofoam head, critiqued and worn by half my classmates, and DONE. I used acrylic paint (thanks to Erin having some to lend me) on the chain to get the color to match, but everything else is enamel. Or broken glass. Or something in-between.

I'm really happy with how it hangs on the face- I made the teardrops out of 10 gauge metal with loads of enamel to get them heavy enough to draw the chain down and keep the cheek pieces anchored.

Side view with the tear drops. I had to sacrifice the articulation on the original hanging tears on the cheek pieces, so I liked the fact that the tear drops by the ears swung.

I'm exhausted from trying to knock out my research paper (on facial jewelry), hence the brevity. With luck I'll have some time to shoot myself wearing the piece and articulate more thoughts on the piece then.

NAKED PEOPLE FRIDAYS!

2010-02-19T14:57:00.000-08:00

Figure drawing Fridays would be more alliterative, but most of you reading this probably know by now that I'll take any excuse to talk about naaaaaked people. That I get to draw. Naaaaaaked!

I managed to roll my ass out of bed by 10AM today, so I caught two hours of figure studies this morning. The model was good, and inexplicably wearing make-up, which struck me as a bit funny. I grabbed my 24 pack of prisma nupastels before leaving the house meaning I had allll the colors ever to work with; so, of course, I started with grey. (Can you tell I threw that chair in at the last minute? It is physically improbable to the point of collapse, unlike its real life counterpart.)

Shading! Where the hell did THAT come from? Apparently my ability to produce tone developed when I wasn't looking, because this was a 15 minute pose and I managed to squeeze a lot of color gradation into it. She had great proportions to play with, too, which I couldn't resist exaggerating with her face and hand.

This was the hour long pose, which I split into 2 sketches. The top one is dedicated to my friend Jason, who was on the other side of the room doing these great exaggerated comic-style drawings that I snuck a look at during the break. I want to challenge myself to break style more during figure sessions and play around some with other techniques.

This one's my favorite- something about the model said "pink", so I ran with it. 20 minutes, and huge pile of pastel dust when I was done getting those dark tones.

Cloisonné Pear and Skull

2010-02-16T21:11:00.000-08:00

If I kept going with the "enameling is my new significant other" metaphor, cloisonne would be that hot thing they do with their tongue. Or in less sexy metaphorical terms, cloisonne is the technique of melting thin metal strips into enamel to create boundaries (check it out!) that you can then wetpack with enamel. I'm a little in love with it right now.

These were my first two cloisonne tests from today- I've been dying to try it out, but I've been intimidated by the process. I even have silver cloisonne wire to work with, although I did these with thin strips of 22 gauge copper for testing purposes.

Skull! I had this design banging around my sketchbook from last term, and it seemed simple enough to fashion out of thin metal. Gave myself a nice slice with the metal when I was trying to straighten it out with my thumb, which'll show me to use my meat implements on metalstuffs. I spent the rest of studio time trying to keep glass dust and shards from breaching my usually awesome bodily defenses that keep that shit on the outside. Not even my ninja bandaids were up to the challenge :(

This was a fun abstract piece that I decided looked like a pear once I was done. I love how enamel gives me license to play with colors abstractly- I used citroen yellow and olive cuz they spoke to me from the enamel cabinet. I roughly enameled a jump ring to the top of it after I accidentally closed the drilled hole, which I'm going to have to get more careful about.

The back- straight transparent olive enamel on metal, no flux. I've been getting into utilizing the backs of pieces to experiment with colors I'd want on the front and I've been getting some interesting results.

In conclusion, cloisonne and I are going to need some "alone time" with the kiln over the next week. Awwww yeah.

Anti-VD Heart piece

2010-02-15T17:31:00.000-08:00

Slightly belated, I know, but I spent Valentines day being unbelievably romantical, which is so completely out of character for me I never got around to posting my yearly anti-VD art piece. This year I was experimenting with enameling, and was shooting to do a stamped letters under transparent enamel heart. That...obviously did not happen. And hence the recent obsession with making technical samples before slapping enamel on projects.

The good thing that came out of this project was that I learned a hell of a lot about wetpacking and manipulating wet enamel. I redid the lettering about 10 times before I was satisfied, and by then I felt I really had a good handle on the process. It still feels unfinished to me, and I'd like to enamel a thick chain of some sort to the spiky handles when I have some time to kill in the studio.

This is the back- I used clear flux as counter enamel, which is what I really should have done to preserve the original stamped text in the first place. C'est la vie.

Mistakes are learning!

HELL YEAH FIGURE DRAWING

2010-02-12T14:44:00.000-08:00

OH MY GOD, I MISSED THE NAKED PEOPLE SO MUCH.

I love figure drawing. Loooove it. But, thanks to Evergreen's wonky budget cuts and my schedule (namely, the only offered figure session is the morning after Designated Drinking With my Circus People night), I haven't been able to do it since....jesus. Last year.

Well, this morning I dragged my sorry ass out of bed, fought the hangover demons (and WON. for the morning, anyways), dredged up some newsprint and my dust-collecting chalk pastels, and went in. I only caught the last hour, but I was rewarded for my efforts by this great model- good proportions, solid poses, didn't spend the entire time with his hand on his dick. Which is a thing I've noticed with almost every male bodied model I've drawn. Don't get me wrong, if my genitals were external, I'd feel a little vulnerable being scrutinized by a room full of people too, but occasionally it'd be nice to see some poses that didn't revolve around "INSTINCTIVE PROTECTION OF REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS".

Anyways.

The only spot open when I showed was the unenviable foreshortened top-of-head-tips-of-toes angle, but eventually I maneuvered around to get him from the side. I only had an hour to play with, so I think I put 20 minutes or so into this one.

Now that I realized how much I miss staring at naked people while clutching pastels I'm going to kick my ass into going to the rest of the sessions this term, hangover or no.

I LOVE YOU, NAKED PEOPLE!

New old posters!

2010-02-10T17:36:00.000-08:00

Nnrgh. My studio time has been EATEN for the past two days by a poster contest for the circus group I run. Making large scale poster art is so very anti-metalworking brain for me, it's been a struggle to get anywhere on my Artificial Tears piece. On the plus side, I made a kickin' poster that I'll try to photograph sometime tomorrow, but damn, it ate my life this week.

But! I do have art to blog aboot, although it's already appeared once here. I have a few Skül! posters left over from Christmas that I'm trying to get rid of. They're on my etsy all kinds of marked down because I want them OUT before I do another run of that print. So if anyone saw these when I first put them up and hungered for a delicious ink-skull of their own- have at it.

Here are the four remnants of my pre-holiday printing frenzy!

Work-in-Progress Sundays: Artificial Tears

2010-02-07T18:21:00.000-08:00

This is the piece I was doing all those blue enamel samples for. It's very much in-progress, but I thought I'd toss up some shots of how it's going. I'm still working out some design aspects of it, which is why I haven't enameled any of it yet. (Planning and thinking before rushing ahead- I'm learning!)

I like the look of it thus far, but I'm debating adding little droplets with jump rings to the bottom of the wavy pieces. I put one on the far right to see how it looked (you can see it more in the picture below). One of the nice things about enamel is that I can cover any holes I drill, so I can do a fair amount of physically designing before I fire the piece.

I'm not thrilled with how it hangs on my face, and I'm considering attaching a chain to the nose chain that would go up and over my head, then attach to the two side chains in the back. I'm tempted to get all chain-design happy like I did with my last mask, but I also want to make sure this piece stands on its own apart from that one. I also need a new MANNEQUIN or other cunning display method, which is why I'm saving this one for next weeks critique as opposed to showing it this week. Time to whack the idea tree again.

Feedback, particularly on the hanging tear drops, gratefully appreciated.

Science by fire- orange enamels

2010-02-06T19:07:00.000-08:00

One of the cool things about enameling is how you can manipulate the texture through firing time. Over-fired pieces get an "orange peel" texture (check it out!), which can be good or bad, depending on what you're going for. In this case, I was going for Science, so it's all good. I used orange enamel because I've been dying to see what it looked like, and I harbor a slightly paranoid distrust of the existing enamel samples in the studio.

This was one of my first solder experiments I did last term, so it's fitting that I effectively destroyed it to experiment with enamel now. I cleverly forgot about how the kiln melts solder like marshmallows in a microwave, but I managed to remember as soon as I peeked in and saw the piece collapsing. You don't really learn things until you fuck 'em up anyways.

In the spirit of "it's already fucked, let's fuck with it", I sprinkled on a little flux, and painted some heat resistant liquid on the solder joint, but no dice- it still melted like fondue. But now I know!

It's a good thing I did this one before I went on to destroy this piece, which was next on the enameling chopping block. I'm still eyeing it for potential, but I think it'll escape the kiln this time around.

Enamel samples- bloo

2010-02-04T15:36:00.000-08:00

I did a series of blue enamel samples on scrap copper to test out colors for a piece idea I'm currently fooling around with (working title- artificial tears). I'm usually crap about testing things out well in advance to making a piece, so these little pieces of glass with the enamel number and color dutifully recorded in sharpie on the back are kind of a big deal for me.

Turquoise, 326

All of these are transparent, because I'm still experimenting to understand the properties of transparent enamel. My first piece using transparent enamel completely covered up the liver of sulfur etched text, and I am going to find out why. With SCIENCE.

Blue bluebell

I overfired this one deliberately, since it was starting to look clearer the longer I left it in the kiln. And I wound up with firescale in the middle (?!). MORE SCIENCE IS NECESSARY.

Cascade, 2510

This one was also overfired, resulting in the blackened edge. But it's also the prettiest out of all the samples.

Cadmium Blue, 321

This one was fired perfectly, so I had to crack the glass at one point so the others didn't get jealous. Also I wanted to see what happened.

SCIENCE!

East of the Sun, West of the Moon Enameled Bird Piece

2010-02-02T18:10:00.000-08:00

Enameling metal is my new significant other.

A little bit about this fresh love of my life. Enameling is the FREAKISHLY COOL process of firing glass to metal. You can do seriously awesome things with it (you can also make godawful kitchy crap, but we're going to avoid that.) It appeals to me because you can add deep, rich, textured color to metal, it's a deceptively simple process with huge amounts of potential, and it takes about 1/5 of the time as anything else in the metal studio.

The really nice part of enameling for me is that it's a perfect side project. I can fire up the kiln, do a bunch of test pieces, and not waste too much time away from anything big I happen to be avoiding. And I wind up with all these bright, shiny, colorful pieces of metal on my desk to toy with!

This is the first serious piece I did using enamel. I had a pierced strip of copper that I was trying to make into a collar with a bird suspended over the throat left over from last term. The bird is suspended by a little jump ring, as you can see from the movement. Not firing enamel over the hole for the jump ring was hell and a half, and I wound up covering the bird's hole (snerk), so the jump ring is just bent into the divot that the enamel left.

This is the other side of the piece- it's got a slight curve to it so it stands up independently. This was the only decent shot I got of the white side, because the glass reflects light so glossily. I might try to take a few others to do it justice. Enameling metal requires using both sides of the piece so that it's equally weighted and doesn't crack the glass, which I was deliberately designing for.

The title refers to one of my favorite fairy tales, because of the whole White Bear, black night, transformation bit. God, I love that story. I wanted the piece to evoke a fanciful, storytale, shadowbox without being too blatant about it, and it think it's my favorite thing I've done so far this term.

(You really have to hold it and watch the little bird twist and turn from black to white to appreciate how much I'm in love with it.)

Prong-tacular!

2010-01-31T19:18:00.000-08:00

This was a quick test piece I did while avoiding my real project the other day. We learned how to set stones with bezels and prongs last week, and it piqued my interest in using prongs in one of my masks.

I'd like to use mirrors in place of eyes in my next piece (apparently all my work this term is going to be inescapable creepy). The idea bouncing around my head is to create elaborate housings for the mirrors using prongs to mimic and stylize eyes.

This is the back. I just used a scrap piece of copper I had lying around, so it already had some interesting negative space going on before I sawed out the prongs. I shaped it a little with the bend so that it would stand up on its own on my desk.

Prongtacular.

New metalwork!

2010-01-29T20:43:00.000-08:00

First of all- apologies. Non-consensual hiatuses, even in the nebulous world of internet-land, are uncool. I disappeared to the East Coast for a month over the holidays, and when I got back I had to throw myself full-fledged into a new term of metalworking. I just now managed to get my head above my work long enough to bring my camera into the studio and photo my first piece of the term.

It's untitled, or at least a good title hasn't come to me yet. I'm spending the next term doing a series of facial jewelry- delving into masks, but not necessarily using masks as my starting point, yanno? Theoretically, I'll end up with three pieces by the end of the term, although I'm hoping to have time to make more.

I spent the first three weeks of class shaping and forming the eye piece, and trying to create a matching mouth piece to hang with a chain on either side of the nose. I didn't bring in Simone here to model it until the day before critique, and when I slipped the piece on her, the mouthpiece looked a BDSM mouthgag gone horribly, creepily, WRONG. Wrong in a thousand ways that didn't crop up at all when I was working it on my face.

I scrapped the entire mouthpiece and started from scratch with some chain I had been idly putting together in my free time. I set up a little liver of sulfur bath at my desk so I could patina it as I went (we were at t-minus 3 hours before the studio shut down for the night). I learned more about chainmaille that night than I have in five months of metalworking.

I wanted to incorporate some fake fur that my partner-in-crime Claire had let me have, so I glued it around the eye piece to soften the look a little and create contrast. It originally exploded out from the mask and overwhelmed the metal, but I trimmed it down and let it be more fuzzy.

By this point in the night, I was comfortable with the mask and chain, and I let myself get into dressing the model. I took a bunch of metal scraps and jump rings and pierced her up (no flinching, she was lovely and stoic). The fur made a great collar and hairpiece, which I gave up on keeping on her head, and by the end of the night I was pretty fuckin' pleased with the end result.

The critique went really well, with one hitch- everyone wants to see another mannequin in my next piece. Which is fine and dandy, but the mannequin tree (read- dumpster) has been scarce this season. Anyone have a spare body lying around the donate to Art?

(Extra long post because I miiiiiissed you all! Mwah! Mwah! I kiss your face, internet.)

Who wants to buy me a drying rack for Christmas?

2009-12-15T18:02:00.000-08:00

(If you're still hoping to be at all surprised by what you get for Christmas, I highly suggest putting your hands over your eyes right about now)

About the drying rack- I kid, I'm building one out of cardboard and chewing gum. No one run out and buy me anything like this. Or this.

Being in full giftmas production mode has made the garage a leetle ridiculous. I worked in glorious technicolor all day, and I got great shades on some of the prints. Some less so (see the yellow orange misregistered one), but I'm overall happy with the results.

I particularly like this one And there are fewer imperfections than usual on it!

I'm increasingly strapped for time, leaving tomorrow morning and all, so I'm probably just going to hunt down some bleach and a toothbrush when I get to the East Coast to clean these up. And bring my makeshift tear down bar (metal ruler) and some erasers for backup. And hope I can find a big enough table to work on at home. AND find something huge to weight them down, because I decided to transport everything rolled up in my magical art tube.

I do love seeing all my work spread across the floor, though, especially with all the colors. It's like a morbid rainbow!

Skül- now with more paper!

2009-12-13T19:04:00.001-08:00

It's snowing like fuckery outside today, but I had the Job of Doom that I've been trying to finish for my client (the one that has thus far suffered from expired chemicals, broken hoses, and lately, overly thick emulsion application), so I put on everything warm I could find and went out to the meat freezer that is my studio in the winter. That screen YET AGAIN failed to work, but I decided not to let it get me down and pull a bunch of prints I'm planning to give to folks when I go home to the East Coast fer Christmas. (I'm making a bunch of other ones, so don't go thinking that y'all know what you're getting early or anything).

My very advanced drying techniques, in the absence of a drying rack, consists of clothespins and a string of prayer flags. I'm finding that, working in my grimy studio without a sink or wash-out booth, that the 15 minutes we spent on cleaning up messy prints in class is increasingly more valuable than all the time we discussed using the humongous expensive exposure unit. And if anyone has any tips for cleaning up imperfections on paper, I'd loooove to hear them.

I started out with the screens I've already had some success with making into prints (das fishy, and Le Pixelation de Psyche), but I wanted to experiment with a third, so I got out my Skül screen and figured I'd print large before tearing the paper down to see how it looked. And because I was getting tired of black on white, I threw in some blue ink.

I fucking love how it came out- the blue adds a hell of a lot to it that I didn't expect, and I wound up with this great graphic rock poster look. I've been using color very tentatively up till now because I associate it with having to be used in layers, but I forgot how dynamic a simple rainbow pull can be.

Freshly pulled glossy wet ink! You can just see the blue tones in this one, I let the black generally overwhelm it to keep it simple.

Next hurdle- figuring out how the hell I'm going to get all these across the country without damaging them anymore.

Trio 'o Shirts

2009-12-01T21:11:00.000-08:00

I pulled these three shirts while yelling along with Amanda Fucking Palmer in the garage today. It's a Christmas commission for an etsy client, who specified the metallic fade ink and the designs. The photography is a little quick 'n dirty, but she loved the shirts.

I love how the ink faded out because of the placement of the skull. I was going to get brave and test my new 16" squeegee on this, but I chickened out and used my old 6" one instead.

This is the top half of the modified mannequin Michael made (say that 3 times fast) who occasionally models shirts for me. I never caught her name while Michael was around, but I've been called her Simone in my head. Her bottom half is white plaster over gold paint- any suggestions? Michael? Name your creation?

Dream of Trees

2009-11-29T19:27:00.001-08:00

Screenprinting has been driving me crazy lately. Strike that- the incredibly bleak weather in the Pacific Northwest has been driving me crazy lately. But 3 weeks of it being too cold or wet to work in my garage studio hasn't been helping.

Paid commissions don't care what my levels of mental capacity are from day to day, of course. I've got two big jobs ("big" here is on a level corresponding to my one-person studio operations- three big jobs will pay my rent for a month) that I wanted to get done during my week off. I prepped, burned, and cursed out two screens for washing out COMPLETELY before I realized that all my fucking emulsion was expired.

There's nowhere to buy emulsion where I am, of course. I can drive an hour to Seattle and get shitty Speedball crap-in-a-can, or I can buy a new gallon online and wait two weeks- neither of which is an option for two jobs that need to be done by Friday.

The third option (according to the internet) is to overexpose my screens. I still have unpleasant memories of overexposing my first screens, but the internet apparently thinks that this is a wonderful idea. I have two freshly emulsed screens in my drying rack right now waiting to try this tomorrow, and if it doesn't work we're going to have to get REALLY creative.

Other things I've been waiting for with increasing frustration: American Apparel to stop making me jump through hoops to wholesale their clothes. I want to buy their stuff, I want to buy it cheaply, I want to put my shit on it and sell it. You'd think they'd want this too, but I'm in the middle of filling out my third resellers sales ID tax form for them this week.

Up top is a piece I forced myself to translated onto acetate because I haven't liked anything I've been able to make come out of my pencil in weeks. Below is the version I'm going to try to burn.

Someday I'll draw something that I actually want to see on a shirt. Someday.

Warning- Gross-ass photographic proof of my life in the metal studio

2009-11-13T16:29:00.000-08:00

OH GOD IT'S AN EARTHWORM UNDERGOING HORRIFYINGLY BOTCHED COSMETIC SURGERY AHH KILL IT KILL IT DEAD.

Apologies for the radio silence, but I've been working on a big class project that's had me in the studio non-stop without a lot of time for fun side projects. As a result, my fingers are pretty lacerated and burned up on a regular basis- but being me, I'm mostly just morbidly fascinated and not really bothered or inconvenienced by it. I decided to document it a little- feel free to skip along to a less physically gross part of the internet any time now.

I'm used to burns from years of fire performance, but hot metal burns are a new experience. I'm treating the two little ones I've got with plenty of aloe and the usual stuff I rub on my fire burns- I'm interested to see how long they last and if they leave any sort of impression.

My thumb is particularly gross because it's in the direct line of fire from my jewelers saw when I cut jump rings. Also, metal dust has been collecting in my cuts, which then get liver of sulfur in them when I work with patinas. So I get these nice black lines all over the place.

I've always had a weird kind of fascination with my injuries, particularly when I get them from doing something I'm proud of (my black eye from a street show > my scraped knee from a botched head stand). Little injuries are like proof of something I did so hard it hurt- I'm fond of them the way I am of being sore from acrobatics every night. Anyone else ever feel like that?

New rings!

2009-11-04T17:39:00.000-08:00

We've got this big assignment in class right now, which means I spend a lot of time getting frustrated and making rings in the studio. Rings are nice, tiny, easy things that let me practice soldering and play with patinas- they are an excellent distraction from trying to fit a godforsaken copper rose in a tiny bottle.

This one was the easiest, and actually is my favorite. Super simple wrap, although shaping it around the mandrel took some time to get perfect and I took some time to sand it smooth.

I like how it constrains my finger- it's like a little sheath.

Simple ring soldered shut, unfortunately too big for my thumb once I hammered it on the mandrel. Good practice though.

Aw, sweet, no? I wanted practice on hammering letters, so I put one of my favorite little stock phrases on it.

"Fuck love. Make art."

Heeee. I showed it to my friend Travis on the bus today, and he turned to me and said "You're very cynical, aren't you Mish?"

And here's the first ring I made out of my "frustration" series. Simple design, tried etching into it with little success (I wrote "serpentine" on it but it was too light for the patina to set in it).

Spirally!

Hee, I like using the macrofocus.

I'm going to keep playing with rings, they're like fun experiments that you can wear (and sell).

Zanni Collar

2009-10-30T16:51:00.000-07:00

Threw this together in the metal studio today for my Hallowe'en costume. I'm going as (or at least invoking the spirit of) the Zanni from the Commedia dell'arte tradition. Every year all I really want is an excuse to wear all my metal jangly costume crap on Hallowe'en- last year I was a Sky Pirate, this year, I'll be a Zanni until I get too tired of explaining my costume to people and start telling them I'm an Acrobatical Moon Kitten from the Post-Apocalyptic Cirktacular World of Tomorrow.

Although I did this quick 'n dirty (I only had three hours in the studio today), it was a good chance to try out a technique for threading ribbon through metal to make an easy collar. I've been thinking in terms of output since I was contacted for a big fancy vendor fair I could make good money at, and this is a design I'll be using more.

I also made some fun discoveries about liver of sulfur, namely, using a lot less of it than I have been. I got a fun bit of rainbow tint going on in this when I dipped it lightly in a very diluted patina. I also fucked up and got some irregular spotting from my overly-fast sanding job because I didn't hammer it flat before I went to town with the flex shaft, but for fast and dirty, I like this piece.

Mandatory self-indulgent model shots!

Time to costume up for the Renegade Circus show tonight! I'm kinda curious if anyone else in the circus community will get the commedia dell'arte reference, but I think I've delved just a titch too obscure this time. Ah well. Everyone gets Acrobatical Moon Kittens, though.

Fisheh Shirt

2009-10-29T12:41:00.000-07:00

Screenprinting in cold weather SUCKS. Half the fun of screenprinting is getting to splash around lots of water when I clean out my screens. It becomes the exact opposite of fun when I'm working with cold, congealed inks that clog up my screen and take twice as long to wash out using cold water. Luckily, Michael left their coffee maker for heating liver of sulfur in the garage, so I've been heating water that way, but it still bites (and continues to take twice the time).

So the very self-motivated reason I finally got around to slapping that fish on a shirt was because I couldn't find anything to go with my new black pants when I was getting dressed this morning. That new Ryonet ink Chriset gave me is REALLY thick, so I thinned it down with silkscreening medium first and it flowed a lot better. I need to get fuckloads of medium if I'm going to keep using it, though.

Here's the newsprint test run I did last night in a fit of creative frustration (I haven't screenprinted anything in weeks because it's COLD and I'm a WIMP and I work in the studio all the time now anyways). I kind of like the halo of what I assume to be oil seeping into the newsprint, so I think I'll print a series on more absorbent paper and experiment with some color elements to make the fish more interesting. I'm really proud of this design because it's the first thing resembling concrete digital design work I've screenprinted and that is kind of cool.

I'm going to throw this on because it'll be done drying by the time I finish writing and get my ass to the metal studio, where I should have been hours ago instead of reading Amanda Fucking Palmer's blog. My performance and art brains always fight on Thursdays when the studio opens late and I run circus open studio at night.

Transient Mode- Home

2009-10-28T17:17:00.000-07:00

Just a little tag I sawed out the other day. It was meant to be a ring, but I haven't figured out how to keep the metal from warping when I hammer letters into it. Possibly less aggressive hammering is in order.

The text, as any Antioch kid will recognize, is taken from the iconic "TRANSIENT MODE-HOME" inscribed over the student union. I used ferric nitrate to kind of match the color of the student union- now that I think about it, I could probably get the whole piece blue/green and blacken out the letters with liver of sulfur to evoke the original better.

(I think we all remember this).

A fair number of people who went to Antioch keep these words close to them- mostly in tattoo form, which was almost as common as the circle-square-A when I went there. I still want to complete this as a ring, but for this first one I might just make it into a little necklace.

Marquis de Sade collar

2009-10-20T18:51:00.000-07:00

One of these days I'll stop using that Marquis de Sade quote as my fall-back inspiration, but for this collar I threw together in class over the past 2 days, I think it's fairly appropriate. One of my classmates made this bad-ASS pierced animal skull choker for our cold joining sample and it made it realize that I all I want in life (or at least in metal shop) is to make huge, constraining, mildly uncomfortable pseudo-BDSM-esque collars.

I had a much easier time with the jump rings and I actually spent most of our class discussion quietly joining them into a chain with pliers- like knitting, but sooo much cooler. I also used a patina for the first time! And it promptly rubbed off all over my neck as soon as I put it on. But it looks hella cool.

I did liver of sulfur on the plates, and ferric nitrate on the jump rings, which was an exciting experiment in making tiny things very hot very quickly

I don't have much artistic thought to attach to this piece- I like collars, I like collars I put on myself, I like making impractical accessories. This was mostly a practice run to get a feel for this shape and size on my neck.

Slightly shaky shot of the back of my neck- the chain holds it on pretty nicely, despite a very simplified clasp. The bright spots up at the top are my nape piercing.

Whee collars! Next step- fixing the patina so it doesn't turn my neck black and blue (not that that's weird, but with acro training I don't need any extra bruising in odd places).

Sun Owl Mask

2009-10-18T16:56:00.000-07:00

My cold joining technical sample for class- flanges, rivets, and jump rings integrated into a single piece.

I like the overall finished piece- but the technical aspect of it is pretty fucking awful. I made the painfully uninformed error of making my flanges out of brass and trying to attach them to copper- of course the copper bent as soon as I applied pressure, and I wound up just soldering the failed flanges together. Stupid flanges.

The rivets were equally barely saved by the skin of my fingers. Even with large gauge wire I couldn't get the ends flat and most of them bent on the back. Sawing tiny bits of wire was an exercise in frustration, too. And I learned real quickly that once one attempted rivet breaks off, you're going to have to get hella creative about fixing the piece. The only thing that really worked was the jump rings, and I feel like you have to be pretty inept to fuck up jump rings.

But enough kvetching about the process- I brought it home and took a mini-photo-shoot while thinking about my concept and where I can take this idea.

I'm attracted to the tension between the vulnerability I feel under a mask and its intended role as a protective item.

There's also the aspect of the mask taking on the qualities of the being it represents- this one started to look like an owl about half way through, and I started shaping the nose piece to reflect that.

I threaded some satin ribbon I had through it to juxtapose with the sharp edges (and it is sharp, I'm deriving a lot of joy from filing things to a point right now) to play with that protection/vulnerable angle.

I want to keep deliberately incorporating the means of attachment to the face into the design.

I also want to work with seamlessly integrating pieces into the existing shape of my body.

Creating an emotion to wear clearly and broadcast in metal.

And allowing art to speak through my body.

I'm still feeling out where I want to take some of these ideas, but I have a much better idea of what my medium is capable after doing this.

Sun Eye

2009-10-13T16:49:00.000-07:00

My second technical sample for class- soldering a ring to a sheet of metal. You can just see the ring under the larger sawn-off bit of pipe I soldered around it.

The soldering is pretty shitacular (and oh god, when I tried to sand off the excess I nearly dislodged the thin gauge ring so I barely cleaned up the pipe part because I sure as hell didn't want to try to solder THAT mess all over again), but I had fun sawing it out and sanding the points real f'n sharp.

I also had a rough time shining it up because it's all weird angles. I want to do patinas soooo badly, I can't freaking wait to start them next week. I'd also like to figure out some way to attach it to my head a bit more permanently. Drilling a hole and using elastic isn't complicated or weird enough for me- any ideas?

I've had eye and face accouterments rolling around in my art-brain since I started metal working- the impracticality and costuming-like aspects appeals to me along with the artistic implications of disguise, hiding, ect. I started work on a mask today that'll incorporate all my cold joining technical assignments with flanges that attach the eyes to a nose piece, rivets creating movable accents on the top and sides, and jump rings dangling tears from the bottom. Here's hoping I don't nearly kill myself on the drill doing it.

Fisheh and business update!

2009-10-11T17:06:00.000-07:00

I feel inadequate posting without some sort of pictoral image included, and since I don't have shots of my metal creation from today (a sort of copper monocle/spyglass eye piece), you get the fisheh I'm working to make into my next shirt design. I'm doing a lot with animal skeleton imagery right now, one because it's almost Hallowe'en, and two because it SELLS (see previous post, re DELICIOUS MONEY.)

I got a mixed bag in terms of printing jobs today- a client dropped off two shirts for me to do for her this morning, and I fucked up the second one (never put the screen back down after printing! Bad!). Luckily, I have a similar shirt in stock I can offer her, but I'm kicking myself for such a simple mess-up. I'd go out a buy an exact replacement but- with my Friend and Local Non-profit Discount- that'd run me exactly what I charged her for the job.

But in AWESOME news, I went over to Chriset's house today to talk about printing labels for her handmade bags, and she traded me SIX quarts of Ryonet Textile Ink for the job. White! Jet Black! Scarlet Red! Lemon Yellow! Royal Blue! Chriset volunteers at the Oly Free Store, where she scored the ink, and I asked her to keep her eyes out for any screens that wander in. I LOVE the free store.

In other awesome news, I ran into Kimya Dawson at Chriset's house, and we got to talking about how she wants to learn how to use some screenprinting equipment she bought. I gave her my contact info and told her I'd give her any of my excess photo emulsion chemicals- christ, it's the least I can offer her for that straight month I spent with her music in my ears music non-stop.

Final thought- I NEED MORE SCREENS POSTHASTE. Jesus. I either need to make more DIY ones myself, or start scouring Craigslist and Ebay for used cheap ones. TOO MUCH ART FOR MY SIX MEASLY SCREENS TO HANDLE.

I can has free market economy?

2009-10-10T15:33:00.000-07:00

I admit it- I've been spending inordinate amounts of time working on screenprinting and typography jobs for clients and equally ridiculous amounts of time inventing new ways to take people's money in exchange for my art. Tweaking designs in Gimp. Prepping screens. Haggling to get the best price for my time and artistic energy. ~~Giving discounts to friends and non-profits~~ GOUGING EVERYONE WHO COMES WITHIN REACH OF MY GREEDY MAELSTROM OF SWEET SWEET EXCHANGE OF MY TIME AND ENERGY FOR THEIR COLD HARD CASH OH YES YES YES GIVE IT TO ME BABY.

Ahem.

So before anyone accuses me of creating art for my own sick capitalist gain, I would like to say- yes. God yes. I hereby brand myself before anyone else gets around to it. Dibs!

But yes, I've been doing all commissioned work lately and I loooove it. Nothing I can make public right now, but I'm starting to get more comfortable with Gimp and Photoshop for cleaning up logos and mocking up designs for folks. Most of the jobs have been for friends or local nonprofits, and those that haven't I've been able to pull out my shameless street performer mojo to make sure people know exactly how much my work is worth.

Here's to the system!

(If you couldn't tell, btw, my tongue is planted firmly in my cheek under that radical queer Bash Back! bandanna. Just so ya know.)

Massively Impractical Ring of Fire!

2009-10-05T16:57:00.000-07:00

I made a highly impractical ring today! If you look closely, you can see my incredibly inexpert silver soldering, but it hasn't fallen apart yet, so I consider that a bonus. I've been playing around with this idea of putting two wings on either side of a ring, but when I finished sawing it looked more like a plume of flame, so I'm running with that idea instead.

The circular part was a class assignment to solder a ring, which took fer-frickin-ever for my first try manipulating large gauge copper wire. Filing it flat took ages, and now I have fresh knowledge of the healing powers of silver solder.

I am terrifically excited for when we start patinas- doing everything in light salmon colored copper is getting old fast. I liked this ring better when it was all dusty and fire rough, pre-shining and cleaning up.

(OH MY GOD YOU GUYS I LOVE METALSMITHING SO FUCKING MUCH AND IT'S ONLY GETTING BETTER AHHHH)

I Started Metalsmithing Today but I Did Not Have My Camera so Here is a Picture of My Pants

2009-09-30T16:48:00.000-07:00

See title, pretty much. My first day of metalsmithing was today and I soldered a tiny, abstract sculpture and it was the most exciting experience of my life re: metalwork. Oh jesus god I am so full of ideas regarding metal art right now.

The metal studio is kind of hilarious in how things just disappear into air in front of your eyes. I was sawing some 18 gauge copper plate today and my saw blade completely vanished mid-stroke. It didn't break- it was just there one second, and the next it wasn't. A bit of silver solder also made a break for freedom when I nipped it off a bit too wantonly at the soldering station. I am going to be very poor in bits and pieces of solder and saw blades at this rate.

Since it's getting unpleasantly cold in Olympia now, I finally went out and replaced my art pants (the ones with more holes than fabric) with some that wouldn't leave me with selective frostbite. They were very boring until they were attacked by an OCTOPUS in my screenprinting studio.

(They also suffered a bleach attack to make the octopus stand out a bit more, but it hasn't set all the way yet and isn't that noticeable).

I'm getting increasingly artistically blocked with screenprinting lately. I feel like I've exhausted and/or gotten bored with my little collection of stock vintage images and ephemera, but my digital design skills are craptastic (it's kinda fucking embarrassing to be 21 and an artist and barely know my way around Photoshop and Gimp for digital art purposes). And my traditional drawing style really doesn't translate well to screenprinting- it's too messy and while I'm learning to think in layers, I'm really not all the way there yet. Screenprinting is all about clean lines and graphically interesting composition, and I'm all...yeah.

But holy shit metalworking. I am still with the glee.

I liiiiiiives!

2009-09-27T21:27:00.000-07:00

Oh, internets, I have not forsaken you. But I start classes again in two days, and I had to go on several necessary epic adventures before I was chained to Olympia. Also I lost my camera cable.

Also also, my in-house artistic inspiration and studio mate just left our house for a fancy shmancy artist's collective in Oakland. I made this for them before they left.

Das front.

Unt das back.

I'm really happy with it. I think I need to get my bleach out more and play with it.

MICHAEL I WILL MISS YOU FOREVER OR AT LEAST UNTIL I COME TO THE BAY AREA NEXT.

I have photogenic housemates, Part the Second

2009-09-12T18:25:00.000-07:00

Quick post before I get back to more important matters (read: drinking fauxmosas). This is a t-shirt I deconstructed fer funsies to match the skeleton print I put on the front. It's surprisingly easy to do the back design, took about five minutes total. Now that I worked out the basics of it, I'm going to start experimenting with the holes and placement. Bonus points: requires exactly no sewing, which I'm pretty incapable of anyways!

Rasterbation and Screenprinting, Part the Second: Some Ideas Come to Delicious Fruition

2009-09-11T19:50:00.000-07:00

AW FUCK YEAH.

Tell me this doesn't look seriously cool. I'm pretty damn pleased with it- I was going crazy trying to find a blank throw away shirt to test this screen on, but then I remembered my left over Arches 88 paper and decided to just make a quick print. It's dirty- I used fabric ink because I couldn't find my acrylic- but it's gooood. Oh so good.

I ran a couple of shirts today, now that all three new screens are touched up and functional. I used one really nice white tank with the Psyche image:

I like how the image disintegrates over the lace, I might experiment more with that on a negligee I have.

And I worked a skull in white and black (the black version is on a beat up ribbed tank, so not much love there).

PLUS I started experimenting with different parts of the octopus stencil. This is the concept I've been rolling around in my head all along, isolated the tentacles and printing them separately on different parts of clothing.

Poll: More tentacles? Perfect number of tentacles? Less tentacles? (not actually possible on this shirt, but in the foooture, maybe).

Productive weekends FTW, y'all.

New screen designs, and working out the kinks (in the not fun way)

2009-09-10T18:28:00.000-07:00

I burned new screens today! But I've done that before- more importantly, I learned how to fix my fuck-ups on the new screens today. This is an important step, because my training with fine art serigraphy dictates that when you mess up a burn, you rend the fabric mesh asunder with your bare hands and rip your acetate stencil into bloody, floppy pieces for good measure. Which is all well and good in someone else's studio, but here in the land of limited resources (reality), I need to stretch my emulsion and screen shelf life as far as humanly possible. So when I fucked up all three burns today, I got creative with my emulsion, filled in the holes with a paintbrush, and wiped out my mistakes with stencil remover.

I'm not completely in love with the images yet, even less so having spent all day touching them up because I can't afford to wipe the screens and re-emulse. I used the rasterbater to enlargify some icons I've been playing with in gimp (a skull, octopus and Le Ravissement de Psyche for sheer perverse fun to see if I could even make it identifiable- see results below).

I only test printed one run, with the octopus, and it was the one that let me know where all the mistakes are. Thanks, free store clothes! I'm also realizing the difficulties in pushing so much INK through the screen, since these are my first full screen prints. What I wouldn't give for a squeegee that's the actual size of my screen to maintain some consistency- that might have to be where the money from my next etsy sale gets funneled to.

(Do you like this shirt? I am Not a Fan, but I am working with it. It will end up in one of my friend's closets, or the cheap-fuck-up-section of my etsy)

Babyclothes and screenprinting idurrs

2009-09-07T17:57:00.000-07:00

My good friend Puck recently had a child (Graciella Holly Adams- happy belated birth day, beautiful), so I printed up a some baby clothes for her before I visited them today. They came out really cleanly, which is nice because I was expected to run into some problems not being able to stretch the fabric over my shirt board. I'd like to start selling kids clothes in my etsy- my new favoritest source for screenprintable items, the Westside co-op Free Store, has them in overflowing boxes, so I'm set for raw material.

I was also planning to print out a bunch of transparencies today at Evergreen, but it's fucking labor day (although- weirdly! we're at the beginning of September, not May. SOMEthing's wrong!) so the library where my beloved photocopier lives is closed. I have IDEARS all prepped, though, so that's the plan of action tomorrow.

Bike Chain My Heart

2009-09-03T19:18:00.000-07:00

I've been mucking around with combining images from different screens lately, mostly because I haven't had a chance to print out any new transparencies to burn. This is my favorite one from today- I tried really hard to get the bike chains to overlap just right, and it came out nicely. It's a fun artistic stretch to design by combining a limited number of elements instead of just finding more images to work with.

(This is what it looks like adorning one of my numerous photogenic housemates)

Fuck This Noise: Reducing Chatter in Linocut

2009-09-01T22:01:00.000-07:00

Whoever came up with the phrase"Fuck this noise" was almost definitely a dissatisfied blockcutting artist trying to reduce chatter. I guarantee it. Chatter, for the uninitiated who still have all their fingers ungouged, is all those little lines in a block print that make shit look all folksy and old school. I generally declare filthy fucking war on chatter when I do linoblocks because I like the crisp look of positive impressions, but this also makes my life about 5 hours of work harder because you can carve away for ages and still not get all the noise. My finished piece still has some messy lines, but I'm okay with it to this degree. (also Steve the Studio Tech was about to kick me out)

The video slideshow I threw together up there is a fun little tour of about six or seven hours I spent inking up my block, cursing, carving away the chatter, inking up my block, printing, cursing, and rinse-repeating. I kept all my newsprint copies for funsies to track my progress, and it looks pretty spiffy in stop motion, plus I threw my original sketch in the beginning so y'all can see how it gets translated (I lost the "Hi" in the speech bubble because I carved it right reading, and everything gets flipped in linocut land so I just cut it out. Mercilessly.)

Here's the finished piece:

But oh wait what's this!

Oh yeah, the final assignment was for a card.

A card that likes you!

I vacillated over the sentiment for awhile, but I decided that having a nonverbal way to alert crushes that I liked them was pretty sweet and it makes me look all sensitive and adorable. The figure on the front is me, if you can't tell from the hair mess and glasses.

And of course, I slung it up on my etsy for capitalist gain. Of course.

"Making" Letterpress assignment- now on 100% less newsprint!

2009-08-31T18:06:00.000-07:00

I finally shot pictures of my finished letterpress print so I could satisfy my capitalist streak and sling 'em up in the etsy. The bottom one I did with a rainbow light-to-dark blue marbleized roll (which is really easy to achieve on the Vandercooks with the automatic rollers). I already got the rant about shimming and cheating done when I posted the first roughs I did on newsprint, so I'll spare y'all that again. However, I was saving these in the studio so I could screenprint a speech bubble over the text as a nod to Neil's role in comic books, but I just discovered today that I burned the image in reverse, and I took it as a sign that the universe didn't really want me to print it. Also I'm freaking tired of the print dungeon.

I had my last Printmaking and Modern design class on Saturday! We did a print exchange and went to the Wayzgoose festival at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle. I did both of these things highly exhausted and hung over, but incredibly it didn't take away from the COOLNESS of the Steamroller Smackdown at Wayzgoose. Artists printed huge linoleum and vinyl blocks (think 3x5 feet huge- and the average lino block fits in the palm of your hand) using a STEAMROLLER as a roller and PLYWOOD as a tympan. Here are some pictures I ganked from flickr to give you an idea:

They hung the posters on the side of SVC to dry, which is pretty frickin' brilliant when you think about how hard it would be to make a drying rack that big.

There were teams of artists inking each block. Each team got half an hour to pull as many prints as possible- when you know a little about how printing works, watching them go through the process under those time constraints is HELLA nerve wracking.

They used a carpet as a pusher blanket, plywood as the tympan, and then they put a goddamn steamroller on top of it. It was pretty incredible.

Pulling up the finished prints. Anyone who knows a little about printing- think about the registration on this thing. Just- think about it. I saw more than one HUGE piece of paper ruined by shifting it around to make registration.

So now I'm a little bit freer to work in the at home studio, although I won't be producing work at a furious pace to meet class deadlines anymore. Until metalworking starts up in October, at least!

More Stuff I Do In My Garage

2009-08-26T20:42:00.000-07:00

I made thirty patches for the Oly Seed Exchange. Thirty! And I did it without washing the screen out in between each one, which shows that something Judy taught me about flooding a screen actually stuck. I still wouldn't do a mass run for something like individual shirts, but I'm pretty proud of my consistency here, and I only sacrificed five patches to the aggrieved printing gods.

Other shit that makes my life as an amateur garage studio screenprinter easier- wiping ink out of a screen with a sponge as opposed to the Hose of Doom. I can't believe it took me this long to realize how much less time I would have to spend on drying my screens if I did that.

Tomorrow I have another marathon session in the school studio to wrap up my hella cute linocut card (which is just a bit sappy thanks to how I've been feeling lately), then I'm skedaddling over to the Oly Seeds Benefit with the fruits of my inky labors. Oly folks- COME OUT TO THIS, THERE WILL BE PIZZA.

Thank you.

Stuff I Do in My Garage Part The Millionth

2009-08-25T14:10:00.000-07:00

I printed this shirt up for a cutie traveling friend of mine who's passing through Oly at the moment, 'cuz you can't go wrong with bike gears and tearing shit down across your chest. I'm still perfecting that damn bike gear design, it keeps coming out uneven when I pull it for some reason. I've also started experimenting with printing on canvas patches, which I've discovered sucks up my screenprinting ink like a motherfucker and makes everything hella splotchy. Practice, practice, practice- if any Oly locals want a sweet patch (I'm doing everything from bike gears to anatomical hearts) and don't mind my imperfections, y'all should come keep me company in my garage while I bang them out.

Speaking of practice, I'm doing a run of patches and shirts for the Olympia Seed Exchange for their benefit this week (Thursday, 6 PM, Fertile Grounds, delicious pizza and I'll print any damn thing you want with this stencil). This is the first one, with tell tale I-forgot-to-tape-off-my-gutters mistakes, but at least now I know that the screen came out decently. My aforementioned traveling friend who I've pressed into being my sexy shop aide for the moment just cut the rest of the fabric for me, so I'm taking it out to the garage to ravage with inks.

Parts of me were broken long before my heart came into it

2009-08-21T21:44:00.000-07:00

I came home from a midnight showing of Inglourious Basterds last night (SO FUCKING WORTH IT GO SEE BRAD PITT KILL NAAAAATZIS RIGHT THE HELL NOW), and I was so hyped on alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, and the usual stimulants that keep me up through midnight movies that I didn't get to sleep until 6 AM. So I started to work into this piece, which I've been rolling around my head since I finished the pedestal one from yesterday. I'm going to have a jagged cut bisecting her chest, possibly some reference to a heart around it, and the title that I'm working under is "Parts of me were broken long before my heart came into it". It's a therapy piece (like, oh, everything else I do), but I'm trying to strike a balance between too needlessly introspective and making work that's appealing to a wider audience.

There is a lot of shading that needs to be done on the chest, and I am not looking forward to it because outside of faces, my ability to shade figures is pretty useless without naked bodies in front of me.

I've been living in the print studio 9-5 (or later if Judy locks me in) most every day this week, so working in chalk pastels was a nice break. My four layer screenprint and letterpress assignment is three layers away from done, and I'm wrapping that tomorrow, hopefully. The fruits of my inky labor are to come.

On a Pedestal

2009-08-18T19:44:00.000-07:00

Mmf, the first thing I've worked on in chalk pastel since getting home (save one shitty attempt that was more to channel angst than make art). I was shooting for a Grecian look, an interpretation of putting women on pedestals. Alternatively, I just couldn't get her legs to look right.

Letterpress assignment (with apologies to Neil Gaiman)

2009-08-17T11:45:00.000-07:00

Letterpress is easily the most frustrating way to have fun in the printmaking studio. It requires an obnoxious application of math, forcing your brain to read upside down and backwards, and in my case, cheating shamelessly when Judy wasn't looking to haphazardly shim my type into the press with tiny bits of wood and metal. It's funny- to make something look messy and uneven takes about three times the energy and calculation than it would to make it look neat and even. (unless you decide to just accept that your professor is going to call you out during critique for your godawfully wrong press set-up and cheat, like I did)

The piece up there is the first rough on newsprint that came out like I wanted- when I finish overlaying the screenprinted speech bubble I want on there in the studio, I'll bring home my finished babies and show them to the world, and sling 'em up on my etsy shop.

The whole process- EVEN WITH CHEATING- took me eight straight hours in the studio, running on a cup of coffee and an orange. I'm so bad at remembering to eat when I work in the print dungeon at school, and my bestie who works at the nearest cafe isn't my bestie anymore, so no more surprise food deliveries (that kid seriously kept me alive on more than one marathon printing occasion last year, bless their considerate heart). Life as a printmonkey ain't easy, and I'm off to the studio all day again today as soon as I hit publish on this.

Oly Type

2009-08-13T18:08:00.000-07:00

Homework from my summer printmaking design class- create typographically diverse alphabet from local signage. Olympia is a stupidly easy town to do this in- it only took me 15 minutes taking pictures downtown to get all these typefaces. And I left a bunch out because I didn't have time to go into all the alleys and hunt down my favorite murals.

(Props to any Oly folks who can identify where I got more than half of these from).

Dr. Sketchy's Part Two

2009-07-24T18:40:00.000-07:00

There were two 20 minute poses at the end of the set, both of which I did in pastels. I like long poses- if I can get my work to "click" early on, I really enjoy working into a piece for a long time. When I can't get something to work from the start, it feels more like fighting an uphill battle to drag my art into something mediocre, but I'm loathe to abandon something and be stuck with a shorter length piece. Both of these clicked in an enjoyable way, though.

The second piece was a challenge to interpret The Windup Space, which is the name of the bar where it was held. I was not to only person to come up with putting a turn-crank into the model, but I WAS the only one to add a tag that said "For a good time turn crank". This piece made it up to the stage too, but it was model's choice and she went with another one.

I leave for Puerto Rico on Sunday, armed with a new vellum sketchbook, chalk nupastels, watercolor pens, and markers. I am full of pleasant fantasies involving the beach and exciting plants and doing naaathing but art for a week. Mmf.

Dr. Sketchy's Scantily Clad Lady Emporium

2009-07-23T18:03:00.000-07:00

I went out to Baltimore's Dr. Sketchy's (if you are unaware of this phenomenon, Dr. Sketchy's Anti Art School has your answers) on Monday night. I have mixed reviews- on the one hand, I missed life drawing, I like gimicky shit like this, and drinking accompanies drawing as it does stretching and MST3King in the rest of my life. On the other, the only thing more pretentious than hipsters are ARTISTIC hipsters, the mc really didn't impress (I have high standards from circus work, but still), and the soundtrack to the evening was pulled directly out of a Wed Anderson film. The Darjeeling Limited, to be specific.

Still, I got some good marker practice in, and I'm groping my way to understanding shading with prismas. I forgot my beloved chalk pastels in Pennsylvania, but Heather lent me her pastels and I went to crazy town and back with them.
There were contests, one of which was to draw the model in spaaaace. This next one got me in the running for the prize, but I didn't win anything that night. It was nifty getting picked the hang out on stage and get cheered for, though. More my scene than being an audience member.

They also did the opposite hand drawing, which I understand is a staple of Dr. Sketchy's fun time. I did it in charcoal, and carefully specified some elements to make it obvious.

One of my quickie warm ups I liked. I shyly started out with my faithful charcoal before I went media crazy.
They also did two 20 minute poses I threw some real work into, but I'll save 'em for tomorrow because this is already the Art Blog Post That Ate Texas.

New art toys!

2009-07-13T19:59:00.000-07:00

My shading is getting better, thanks to the FIVE BRAND NEW GREY MARKERS I laid hands on at Art Things in Maryland yesterday. Funny story- this art store has known me since I was two years old and living in England, because my aunt did a goku birthday card for me that was up as a how-to in the shop for yeeeears. I've been making pilgrimages to there ever since, but I don't think they've seen me since age 16, so the owner got a bit of a shock when I walked in yesterday.

Other stuff from the sketchitybook includes a rough for a graphic short I've been tossing around in my mind for ages. I tend to get it in my head whenever I find myself romantically entangled that I should start illustrating my relationships-I used art to process everything else, why not that? It'd be damn good reading, if nothing else.

This particular one was a reflection on falling into love for brief periods at a time- weekends, weeks- as tends to happen when you travel (or when I travel, at least). For the first time recently I fell with a lot of awareness as I was falling, like Alice floating down the rabbithole and examining the objects on the walls as she descended.

Enough for today- more on all that tomorrow as the ideas germinate.

Tits and Tentacles

2009-07-10T08:57:00.001-07:00

No scanner access until today, so y'all get my Tits and Tentacles picture, plus some sketches from yesterday. I'm struggling to figure out how to shade using prisma grey markers, but I think this picture was a breakthrough for me. Still working on it, though.

Disembodied caaat head. I feel like I'm copping Heather's style, just because of the media. I learn marker shading so slowly, but progress is beginning to happen.

That's me pushing nasty reality away from my happy bubble above, btw.

Too Much Coffee

2009-07-08T14:19:00.000-07:00

Another in my series of "this is what I've been up to while traveling" comics. The aforementioned coffee (which was DELICIOUS) is actually responsible for three other comics aside from this one because I couldn't sleep for the LIFE of me that night.

I am slowly learned how to shade with some amount of skill. I brought my set of greyscale brush pens with my on vacation, and they're getting a workout.

That's my "going to a nice restaurant better femme up" look, btw. I didn't actually own any girly heels until about a month ago when my friend Dan gave me a pair of his for my birthday. Dan's a rockstar like that.

Reading Bubble

2009-07-07T08:46:00.000-07:00

I need to work on my shading, but the comic journal idea is good practice. I could really use some greyscale prismas making my life easier, but c'est la vie.

James is the reason for this one- James and his stupidly good reading suggestions.

More travel comics

2009-07-06T12:24:00.000-07:00

More comics from my travels! On my flight from Seattle to Chicago, I had this awesome, involved conversation with Muriel Anderson about performance, music, events management, and the range of emotions that accompanies it all. She let me put my ukulele on top of her guitar in the overhead baggage bin and emailed me the sheet music for a cello and guitar composition she had written. It was really inspiring for me as a performer.

Grey brush pens and a range of white prismas are my heart when it comes to comics. Swear ta god. Also, the first appearance of my nape piercing in a self portrait!

VACATION.

2009-07-03T21:01:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Baltimore, which means a veritable fuckload of journal comics from my travels and the craziness of coming back to my high school hometown. Last night I drank a bunch of coffee and inked a mess of them, so more to come on a semi-regular basis.

Alas, poor Yorick!

2009-06-20T17:19:00.000-07:00

Print 'o the day today- available in the etsy shop here. Oh, it is becoming so addicting.

Sombrero de Copa

2009-06-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

Oh, yes yes yes, I am a printing fiend. Etsy shop is here, garage studio calls my name, I will continue trying to toss pieces up on here with somewhat regularity.

Katie

2009-06-17T14:57:00.000-07:00

Oh man, I have disappeared from blogging, but it's only been because I'm overflowing with screenprinting ideas and I'm pretty much in my studio degreasing and prepping screens like a fiend. Also, it's summer which means work and gigs and adventures and excellent people coming to visit, like my lovely friend Katie who I convinced to sit for a quickie sketch this morning. I'd like to do a sketch of everyone who comes to visit me during the summer so I can have a gallery of the fucking awesome people who populate my life. Plus then my art gets to travel all over the place with the people who're in it- a double plus win.

Forgiveness and studio shots

2009-06-13T20:07:00.000-07:00

Three days sans art posts! Believe me when I say that I am the soul of humility and contrition. But in my defense, I turned 21 on the 12th, and we're in the midst of Evergreen's graduation, of which three of my housemates partook. There's been excessive cooking and outings and parties and heavy, heavy drinking many nights in a row. Less time for art than usual, although my life'll no doubt empty out next week and I'll be producing work at a stupid rate yet again out of summer ennui and my emotional failings.

To make up for it, here's a shot of my newly organized studio space! I spent today re-doing my walls, which are crammed full of as much art as I can fit on them. I like to keep lots of figure studies around my easel for reference, but it was getting up the three layers of paper and ridiculousness. It's more nicely spread out now.

Note that all my supplies are crammed on a tiny two inch wide shelf jutting out of the wall. ~~It's a pain in the ass~~ it's a good way to make sure my space doesn't get too cluttered!

Shower

2009-06-10T16:34:00.000-07:00

Blatant lies from yesterday about putting up the fishey prints- for some reason all I felt like today was watercolor. Nice, attention consuming, detail oriented, watercolor. Didn't feel like asking anyone around to get naked for me, so I pulled a picture of myself from a recent photoshoot for reference.

I love the aesthetic of detailed, soft shading and hard graphic lines- but I really haven't got the feel for it yet. I struggled with those stupid swirls for way too long.

My page of sketches before I got into my piece. Pencil lines and watercolor for some reason just appeal to me implicitly. It's gotta be the illustrative quality.

Speaking of, Terrible Yellow Eyes has me pumped up on inspiration on a daily basis. Check it out- all gorgeous work based on Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are".

Fishehes, parts two and three

2009-06-09T22:26:00.000-07:00

The second part of making my fish screen, coming up with the next layer. I was thinking in terms of bubbles, and came up with a cityscape silhouette. If you look closely, and share my linguistic geekery, you'll see where I hid the cyrillic letters for fish in the buildings.

And because I was a failure at posting yesterday, here's the transparency I drew from my original ink sketch (photographing plastic- less than easy). I also burned the screen today, although the emulsion didn't harden quite enough and I wound up with a little haze trying to wash out. I made a new drying area (cardboard box with a fan propped up) but I only left it for an hour or so which I think was the problem. If I was anything less than supremely lazy, I'd walk the ten feet to my garage and throw a picture of it up, but as it is y'all can see it tomorrow when I pull the first prints.

I get a lot out of serigraphy, but every time I burn a screen I feel like there's so much more I could be doing design wise. I haven't put any of my screens to fabric yet because I don't feel like they're good enough. Luckily my technical skills are improving every time I pull together a print, and with luck by the time my designs are satisfying I'll have the ability to print them tightly.

Fisheh!

2009-06-07T23:29:00.000-07:00

Serigraphy concept art o' the day. I'm thinking 3 layers for this one (ambitious after having only pulled one single layer print thus far, I know) to get the shading just right. It also needs something stylized to represent its environment, I'm thinking about throwing a circle around it and calling it a bubble to match the ones coming out of it's mouth.

Shit, do I love me some fishies.

Beauty in Madness Print

2009-06-06T17:53:00.000-07:00

First print I pulled of Beauty in Madness, on (slightly splotchy) newsprint. Accounting for some rough spots, this is the best print I've pulled in my personal studio since I set it up. On a handstretched screen I made out of a picture frame and some old curtains, no less.

New emulsion (not Speedball, mercifully- overpriced crap), paint pens, better pressure on the screen- all things I know now are necessary for a good wash out. I'm really pleased with this, although I might try drawing fluid on the text to make it legible. The linocut effect from the fine pen is a nice surprise too.

I need: a better space at hip height to pull from. I made the same mistake I did in the campus studio and let the ink dry on the screen too quickly before I managed to pull more than 3 prints.

Next step: LAYERS.

EBH status: Oddly okay thanks to acrobatics and the physicality of working on screens. Then- surprise pitfall!

Beauty in Madness

2009-06-04T17:22:00.000-07:00

I HAVE PAINT PENS.

This is a transparency I just put together (see the nifty shadows?) with my new screens in mind. All my serigraphy ideas lately tend to deal with madness, probably because I'm drawing on Fly as inspiration. And y'know, crazy brain.

Emotional blackhole status: massively on edge and twitchy.

Emotional blackhole

2009-06-04T00:05:00.000-07:00

Six minutes past deadline, but this blackhole opened up under my feet and kept me from doing most anything.