Dream of Trees

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.