Linoleum - Tumblr Posts

Edition

Wip carving the last seal print. I always start with the crux of block first, which in this case is the head/whiskers

Wip.

Someone asked me the other day if I transfer images to the blocks I want to carve and the answer is no. Every print is essentially 3 separate art pieces, all sketched and done directly on the block. The pencil layout, which establishes the composition, the ink layout which sets up the loose guidelines I follow, and then finally, the carving itself, which is a completely different part of my brain to the last two stages.

The final scanned image to a project that spanned more than a year in the making. The end feels happy and sad, but also freeing to return to a backlog of other ideas.

The seal with the spots is based on one I swim with up here, a nod.

Kitchen Pantry sized crafts and arts Kitchen pantry with a linoleum floor

Three Wolf Moon, the second relief print I ever made. I had time to do this because dude to snow and otehr problems winter quarter was too short for Ben to assign and teach my intro to printmaking class how to make Dry Point prints. probably a good thing because I was able to go into intaglio with fresh eyes and no preconceived notions about how to attack a copper plate.

anyways, I somehow had extra time even after remaking my original fish print (because I refuse to ever do monoprints ever again, even though that would have been a good thing to re-do) and I made this.

I'll be darned if I don't still rather like it.

so, this one came pretty much directly out of my observable life. this is pretty much straight up a drawing of how Christine met her dearboyfriend Kimball. it was one of the ones I did before I was in the BFA so it also predates buckling down and trying to make all of them make sense as a story so because of this it's still kind of a one-off. what it does for an installation is provide context for characters that exist outside of Deer Girls immediate experience. also everybody effing loves mermaids.

I re-carved this one and re-printed it for my BFA show, in that print the sky is completely carved out and white and the water is black, this makes a greater contrast to the textures on the body of the sailor so he looks more hairy than lazily carved. the lack of a background is also has more of an impact with a deep dark water under bright white sky.

side note, I am still unhappy with her nose, I received complaints that a shirtless guy in a captain's hat looked "kind of gay" which I countered with "he's groping a mermaid, he is at least Bi-sexual". I also did much of this while zonked out on painkillers which meant I took a sharpie and wrote NO NO NO on a couple bits of the block to remind myself to only work on complicated bits whilst stone cold sober. like all things there are bits I would do better now, but for what it is, it is complete.

so, here we have the ???? part of the wolves four point plan that ends in DINNER!

it is called "She Hoped That The Wolves Had A Plan, Aside From The Obvious One"

as I did not know what I was going to use this for when I made it, and I was so high on adrenaline and predinizone I only printed two, and I gave the other one to Kurt, here pictured as the hunter. because this print was made at the last possible second of applying to the BFA program (hence lack of attention to details and escher-girl butt and side boob anatomy problems) it is also absolutely against every bit of inspiration in my original very first Deer Girl print with her glomming on Bacchus.

but, it did actually happen. so there's that.

so, what happened was that in the middle of my predinizone treatment I was so hopped up and manic that I was just dancing late at night in the drawing studio. possibly to Lady Gaga's Alejandro. (senator I do not recall that infectious beat) and I turn around and there's Kurt. and he's just watching me. and I'm all "Hey Kurt!, whatcha doing?" and he's all "are you just dancing? and I'm like, "Yup!" and then he felt awkward and left. because while I had maintained eye contact through out our conversation, I NEVER STOPPED DANCING.

so I made this, because, again, I was hopped up on steroids.

during my BFA year I had to put it into sequence with the other images and it clicked into place that this would be a wolf's idea of an excellent distraction. I wish I had gone back and carved some wolf silhouettes into the woods, but it's too late now, and they are presumably behind him anyway.

I feel that the most successful part of this is how the body of the dude and the trees he is pushing apart frames the scene, the texture of the bark and his arm hair turned out nicely. I do think I should have made him blonde because his hair disappears into the black of the forest floor.

also could have just used a lot more care all over. if I was going to show this scene again it would be done radically different.

an older print and far smaller than my original ones, this was a first draft of the idea that deer girl has lady friends she can talk to, they are mermaids and inherently more feminine, I had toyed around with the idea that this is where the dress came from, an issue still unexplored, but everyone knows mermaids are naked, or they have little starfish as mermaid bras.

except, as I know from my association with starfish at the aquarium, they have their little horrible chompy mouths dead center, so that would be right on the nipple and a terrible idea. this is infact what these two are talking about, mermaid fashion problems.

the other half of the problem is of course that these mermaids (my mermaids) can split their tails and have legs for limited periods of time on land, so how would you have clothes that transition well between environments while still keeping the mermaid comfortably damp? (I think they'd wear rubber boots, because their feet would be tender and need shoes, and the boots would hold lots of water so they could stay on land longer without drying out)

also my mermaids are man-eating sirens. because my mermaids are cool.

so, this is deer girl drinking from a stream, she's probably going to get giardia like that, but this is a fantasy universe and the bit where she makes tea requires a teapot and the standard Mrs. Beaver's Sewing Machine Problem starts all over again.

not that a lot of where this is happening isn't basically Narnia. because it is, but it's interregnum Narnia, (between human kingdoms) or at least narnia with a lot more grey zones than the books had, and laid over a local landscape, not an english one. but the archetype of the primeval forest where animals and trees talk is a really old archetype so I don't feel bad stealing it.

I just want to say those are really good legs, I'm still happy with them. I try my best to make deer girl look like her feet actually take her weight, which can be a problem when drawing any digitade bi-pedal creature. the human foot is plantigrade for a reason.

also that ear, man I love the little details, a lot of this is bad, but it has the seeds of better stuff within it.

this one is called something like "Bad News Birds" it's tiny and crude and it was a part of my proposal for the whole deer girl project.

deer girl talks to birds, or more accurately she listens to birds. because birds know what is up. this is just a fary tale fact. I remade this piece as an intaglio but I think this one is still pretty good.

origin of the first bit of on the spot bullshitting when my teacher asked why she doesn't have any clothes on, I replied, she lives in the woods, you can't get clothes in the woods. of course I came up with a dress for the next one. one I still have yet to explain. oh well.

I still like the face on this one, it was so effing tiny and I still got that nose just right.

little victories.

stole the idea from Christine, who still did it much better than me in her use of the phrase "don't sweat the technique" although I feel I'm taking the phrase more literally than she did. you will notice my backwards letter "N"s all over the place, (even carefully done as still backwards on the depicted block in my hand)  and my left hand depicted as covered in bandages, and the numerous weird printing errors that appeared on every use of this block.

it is a print about how I really ought to sweat the technique a little more.

it is a print of me, holding a speedball carving tool and the block that I will carve to become this very image of me. Recursion! and the block within a block is holding a little print but the resolution breaks down pretty fast even though I wished to imply it was this image again.

it was done for fun. I regret nothing.

originally made for a print exchange. I was the only person to submit on time, but my piece was probably also the least superlo (forgive me it was an early experiment carving backwards words and after having it pointed out I cannot unsee this mistake)

everybody loves this piece until they ask what gave me the idea, so fair warning.

somebody I know on twitter is a very out of touch artist, and there was a hashtag during the super bowl that was #superbowl, so they look at this in their "trending topics" feed for the day and tweet, "I feel like I'm missing something, what the heck is this Superb Owl everyone is talking about?"

tadah.

"she hung, caught by the vines"

so, this is somewhere around the moment where Deergirl looses her antler, it's a bit of a getting chased into the briar patch moment, I wanted to imply she basically jumped into this to escape her pursuers and the tangles of the vines are both entrapping and slowing her fall.

all climbing vines I have always viewed as vaguely predatory, blackberry vines, grape vines, wysteria, kudzu, morning glory, climbing roses, ivy, and any plant that climbs and strangles.

I want to show a lot of moral ambiguity though, the vines could hold onto her and use her rotting body as plant food after she eventually dies, but they dump her on the ground instead. likewise the wolves could decide to eat her at any point, but they need somebody with hands for particular tasks.

 A Cat May Look At A Kinglet.

This is an example of the title driving the idea. I wanted to do something interesting with an extra half-block I had laying around and I was in a really pissy mood which was mostly directed at the people around me.

if you couldn't tell by the kitty-gon' cut-a-bitch expression in that cat's face.

anyways, this is another exploration into using color, and another example of why I don't spend a lot of time working with color. I naturally tend to use color like a printmaker, my impulse is to lay down blocks of a single color that may be built up or layered but still exist in blocks. I admit that this is unnecessary in a piece like this, where the color is applied by handcoloring with watercolor paint.

so I'm stuck in a bit of a bind when it comes to critiques, on the one hand I catch crap from painters for not using color like a painter if I'm going to paint at all. "it should be more blended, why do you still need those dark outlines, you need to look at real colors out in the world, blue isn't just a monochromatic blue, you can't just decide you want a color and take it right out if the tube"

valid, but annoying, I like my blocks of color.

and the printers, who don't consider hand coloring to be a legitimate printmaking process, because it is both applied directly by hand to the paper with out an intermediate step, and because it destroys the sanctity of a printed edition by introducing irregularities.

as if my color editions aren't irregular as all heck as it is.

storal of this mory, if you can't please everybody, you gotta please yourself.

The Moths Were, As Always, Fatally Curious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rabbit, Colored version, currently cherished in private collection.

(that's right I sell things)

Antler

12" by 15" Linocut print, second of the animals/objects series-thing

three little mice are nibbling on the antler, this is an image I pretty much absolutely had to do. everybody who knows anything about deer also knows that mice will eat antlers. one of the reasons mother can let her animal bones collection sit outside in all weather is that because of the resident cats we don't have enough rodents to eat them and they'll be fine. my grandfather made a left handed knife for himself out of an antler he picked up and it has mice nibble marks on it. also I get questions about "so what happened to that other antler? so here's your answer. eaten by three mice.

this piece also has more roses, I was kinda thinking about mom's bone/antler/tooth collection on the bullet-catcher under the rose bush, and I was thinking about being home. a lot of the time the plants are an environmental symbol. roses for home, ivy for college, grape vines for parties and bars, things like that. I'm quite fond of climbing plants and I consider them to be kind of sinister and aggressive (you would too if you'd ever fought back mom's roses or the unending sea of blackberries) even as they usually just come off as decorative to most people. 

I was also feeling like my ideas for the things that I do were under a lot of criticism. which I can either usually brush off or use constructively to make improvements, but this was the kind of criticism where I was just being told my art was worthless and I was just feeling like I was being ripped up over it. and then I was making this at the end of the year, so I was in a huge hurry to do everything and put together everything anyway, I had no mental-energy-spoons left in the drawer to use for my usual brush-off, so I just made some good art about it.

lot of the time that's all you can do.

Talking With Her Was Deeply Refreshing.

linoblock print, 18 by 24, black and white, same as the rest of them.

so, this was one of my fall quarter prints, it's kind of an apology for the other mermaid prints I had made by then. I wanted to make something sweet and pretty and I wanted to put some serious care into the little foreground details and I think I succeeded at that, the background runs into trouble mostly because I needed more practice at clouds and mountains and oceans.

this print is also an effort to make sure my series unambiguously passed the Bechdel Test, but they're probably talking about boys.

the madrona tree above them and the blooming waxy-leaved strawberries underneath are both plants that exist around here shown in their appropriate environment of an ocean cliffside and that's part of what I'm trying to do with my mythological things. I want to take the typically euro-centric mythos of my upbringing and make it local, make it personal. I could incorporate, and I have considered incorporating, more of the native PNW imagery but I don't want to be disrespectful so mostly I hold off on it.

now I say mostly, because these are carvings, they are monochromatic and I do take some inspiration from the traditional formline styles of native bent-wood boxes. I am however, just using that as a way to think about composing and balancing my monochromatic compositions, not as a way to think about making shapes nor yet as a stylistic decision. I can't say I'm not apeing the content of native art though, because I am talking about a personal/shamanic mythos, and I am mostly depicting animals and part-animals. but both of those things are common world wide, so I don't worry about it.

DeerGirl herself recalls both the Grecian images of diana as lady of the hunt, and a feminized image of the horned Sorcerer in the cave of Les Trois Feres. other than that I bet you could find more than a dozen different interpretations of a girl wearing antlers on Tumblr alone. and things go in and out of popularity but images of my mermaids are always popular.

go figure, ideas are weird like that.