More Frinton Press

Thanks, Frinton Press, for choosing my design as part of your awesome new line of screen printed wrapping papers!  The new photos look really great.  You can check them out on the Frinton Press blog, here.

Frinton Press Me + You

Image care of Frinton Press

Hello, hello,

I'm in New York this week, going to museums and hanging out with old friends and tracking down some art directors with the help of a SCAD prof., and generally having a good time.  Tonight there is a free Andrew Bird concert in Brooklyn that should be pretty great.

I'm not going to be able to make very much this week (except writing my thesis proposal, if that counts, which is the reason I'm in the lovely Outpost eating sammies and using internets).  But, I am excited to say that my Fishbird design was accepted by the Frinton Press Me + You contest for artsy screen printed wrapping paper.  Each design that was chosen was paired with a second design; I was paired with illustrator Andrew Walker who made some crazy kaleidoscope naked ladies.  You can see the finished prints here.

For this honor I receive a roll of each of the finished wrapping papers, so watch out friends with upcoming birthdays.  Naked-lady-fishbirds are coming your way.

Alexander Ink

I was lucky enough to have one of my prints chosen for the Alexander Ink Exhibition.  If you're in Savannah tomorrow, come to the opening at Alexander Hall from 6:00-7:30.  See you there!

SCAD MAT Conference

A few weekends ago I got the chance to teach a printmaking workshop with my friend Jon.  We taught "Fast and Dirty Monoprints!" (exclamation point!) to some enthusiastic SCAD professors and SCAD MAT (Masters of Art in Teaching) candidates.  It was such a great experience, and really inspired me to incorporate more printmaking techniques in my illustrations.  I forget how quick some printmaking processes are.

We taught prontoplate, trace monotype, and stencil relief printing; they are all fairly easy and don't necessarily require a press.  We mixed some colors for the conference-goers ahead of time (that's the palette above) and then brayered the ink on to some smallish, prepared beech wood sheets.  The blue-green fade on the left was made on Japanese paper with just the solid ink block.  You can make a stencil print from there by laying your stencil between the block and the Japanese paper (print on the left, stencil on the right).

Here's the demo print, above!  The orange marks and Gen. Casmir Pulaski's body are examples of trace monotype.  You lay Japanese paper onto a thin slab of ink (or an inked wood block) and draw through the back of the paper with the back of a brush, a finger nail, the palm of your hand, you name it.  Pulaski's face was made using a pronto plate.

Here's Jon teaching pronto plate technique.  Pronto plate printing is similar to lithography, except that instead of drawing on a boulder with grease, you feed a piece of treated plastic through a laser printer.  Hooray!  Then you treat it with gum arabic, bake it, and ink that baby up.

Then you can run it through a press or rub it with a baren (bah-ren) or a wooden spoon.  And you can layer all of these techniques!  Awesome.

Fish Birds

Today I made fishbirds.  They're going to be part of a screen print I'm making.  I'll post it when I finish.  Enjoy!

Anemometer

This is an old piece that I made for my dad for father's day while I was interning with the Post Family this summer.  It is a three screen screen print with gold leaf (I was really into gold leaf this summer, huh?).  My dad is really into kiteboarding, so the gold mark is a kite and you can just see the little guy floating in the water.  The symbols are used in conjunction with an anemometer, a device used to measure wind speed, and denote speeds from zero knots up to hurricane winds!

The Good The Bad & The Ugly

The poster is finally done! I decided to nix the fat ampersand and draw a thin one on with a gluestick and gold leaf. I finished them at Post Family the last week of my internship. If you're in Savannah this Friday, come to our show!

durn technology: a paper stencil screen print

Yesterday I received in the mail one! CS5! software disc! of my own!

This is after an awful week in which a deadline for an illustration for my dream publishing house intersected with the unexpected end of my free Photoshop trial. Long story. Suffice it to say that it ended semi-triumphantly in the General Access Lab of SAIC (How did I get in without an ID? Magic?) where I scanned a gouache illustration painted on screen printing paper. Some paper-lover out there is reading this and a tear is trickling down his or her cheek. GOUACHE ON SCREEN PRINT PAPER? Ayeyaiyaiyai.

So my Photoshop arrived the day after my deadline and I wanted to make out with it and throw it across the room at the same time. However I did neither. I just decided to do my next poster--it's for an upcoming SCAD Illustration gallery show at Desotorow called "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly"--by hand.

Here are my supplies! Black paper, an X-acto knife, bitchin fluorescent pink ink (hm wait, that's for a different project) and gold leaf. More on that later.