Cloisonné Pear and Skull

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.

New old posters!

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!

Who wants to buy me a drying rack for Christmas?

(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!

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.

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

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.