Klimt Monoprint

On Google+ I'm in a Printmaking community that talks about and shares our ideas and projects in the printmaking mediums, and the other day one of the community members, Ken Swinson, posted some monoprints he had done. Seeing what he had done made me excited and made me want to work on some monoprints. Thats when I my brain was stuck by lightning, I was working on a project for my oil painting class and I decided this process (monoprint) would be perfect for this project.

For those who are unfamiliar with printmaking and its processes, typically in printmaking you will carve or etch into a surface, you will roll that surface up with ink and then you run the image and paper threw a press where the ink is transferred to your paper and you have a print. In short, printmaking is like glorified stamp making. In this process you can make countless images and they will typically turn out the same. But monoprints are different. As stated in their name "mono" means one, so you can only create one print from a monoprint, making them as original and unique as an oil painting. Ill explain the process.

So for my monoprint, I took a large sheet of plexiglass and on the back of it I drew the image onto it so that I had a reference, and so it was easier to register the different colors. Then I will roll the whole plate up with ink. Because I knew this was going to be a 4 colored image, I started with my light color moving to my darker color. This is just a flat piece of plexiglass so where I dont want ink I had to remove it by scraping it with plastic scrapers, cotton balls, q-tips, and anything else that would either remove the ink completely or give me a fun texture so as the other colors over lap the image would be visually interesting.

The other thing I used to remove/give me interesting textures was use mineral spirits. When the solvent touches the ink, the ink will spread and leaves interesting marks. It was a lot of fun to play with and adds interest to the image, but always safety first, so make sure you're in a nice ventilated space. So you notice that I wiped away the ink from where the figures were, and some patterns in the dress. Here I have added the yellow ink and also the magenta ink, and you can start to see the magic of layering thin opaque inks. Where the magenta overlaps the yellow it becomes orange. And you can control how bright the colors will be depending on how thick the ink is rolled out on the plate. For example, the color here is more red-orange because the magenta is more dominate because it was thicker then the yellow. But if I wanted a more yellow orange or even a brighter orange I would use less magenta so the yellow would shine through more.

Now I added the cyan color which gave me the greens and violets. The image is more rounded now with a little more depth because of the lighter colors coming forward and the darker colors pushing the image back.

Lastly I added the black ink to add even more contrast to the image. I kept the figures blank because I knew I was going to add oil paint to them, otherwise I would have added more colors to them.

And here is my final image. After all that time scraping, rubbing, and playing with mineral spirits, I finished my print and painted the figures. I call it "Disagreement in Green" and the size is 23 3/4" x 20". Whew, could you image is picture matted and framed in a nice black frame? It would look really sharp!!

Studio 546 One Night Art Show

This last weekend (April 26) I was invited to participate in an art exhibit in a newly opened gallery space, Studio 546 in Cedar City Utah. I was 1 of 3 artist featured in this show, the 2 other artists are classmates of mine Zane Anderson and Jordan Green.

I was excited to showcase my work, its been a few years since I have shown my work in a place where the public could see. Most of the time my work is only seen my classmates and teachers, and my mom :D. I am trying to make a presence online through different social media sites like Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, DeviantART, my personal website and Blogger, but like most art its more impressive when you see it up close and in person. So I was really grateful and excited for the opportunity.

Days leading up to the show, I was busy in the studio working on framing and matting my artwork.... man, it almost takes as long preparing your work for a show as it does creating the work itself! If I could offer a tip to any other up and coming artist, make sure you leave yourself plenty of time (a week at least) to matte and frame your work especially if you're going the inexpensive root by making your frames yourself. And it is a money saver! Last weekend I matted and made 5 frames which cost me about $200 for all of the materials, but at the very least it would have cost me $200 per frame if I had gone to a professional matte and frame company! So making your own frames is a big money saver, just FYI, leave yourself plenty of time to get them all done so you're not stressing out right at the end.

The new art space is in an old Pillsbury mill that the gallery owner is renting out. The outside maybe doesnt look that great to some people but he has done some amazing work to the inside! From tile floors, wood trim around the house, solid wood beams and open spaces in many parts of the building. When I first walked through the space I was jealous that I didnt see it first and turn it into my personal studio.

The art exhibit went great! I was really pleased with the turn out we received and the feedback I got from the public. Unfortunately the show was only for one night, so its no longer on display but what I considered the to be the highlight of the night was just seeing people I didnt know come and view my art and make comments about what they liked about it. It was fun to ease-drop on people sometimes and hear them connect with some things in my artwork. I heard a few people say "I feel like that all the time" as they looked at "Distractions" (my relief print with all the different hands holding different items representing different distractions that seem to distract in life like money, due dates, family and work.) It was nice to hear people making connections!

I had 5 pieces in the show (from left to right) "Distractions" "Less Think, Do More" "Self Portrait" "Courage Even in Darkness"  and "Between Life and Death." The popular piece of the night was "Courage Even in Darkness" That is the one people seemed to respond to the most, and I was grateful to hear it, so this summer I am planning on creating a few more Intaglio pieces to put in my portfolio.

My next show will be in July at The Grid, a local coffee house in Cedar City Utah, and it will be up for a month so this was a good preparation for my next show.

4 Color Test Print

These last few days I've been working on a new test print. I mentioned before that I'm enrolled in a few painting classes and for our new assignment we have to do a painting "in the style of an old master." Again I talked with my teacher to see if it would be okay to do a print with oil painting integrated into it. Again she agreed. Yessss! (Painting is okay, but I love printmaking more...) 

So the artist I chose to do my print/painting from is Gustav Klimt. I really like how most of his image is flat and a lot of implied textures with shapes but then the figure's face and arms are rendered more life like. So I wanted to create a piece that was similar to his style but as a print. 

The other thing I wanted to try this time was using multiple matrices (the sintra I carve my image into) and print it in a similar way a inkjet printer would. In simpler terms, an inkjet printer has 4 colors inside it; Yellow, Magenta, Cyan, and Black and when those colors overlap on top of each other you get the other various colors like your greens and purples and oranges. That is what I wanted to do with this text print, but manually. 

I have never done a multiple print like this before so instead of just diving head first into a large piece I decided to do a smaller text print first to try it out. So that's what you're looking at now. 

After carving each matrix (4 in total) for a few days I got ready to test it out. 

Here is the yellow print coming off the press.

When doing a multi-colored print, I always print the lighter color to the darker color.

Then I printed the red ink on top of the yellow. Now you can start to see that the yellow coming threw the red makes it look more like an orange color.

Now for the blue.

Now its really starting to stand out. I planned it so the figure would be more yellow/orange and the back ground would be blue/purple to give it contrast.

Then lastly I added black to accent certain parts. Over all the image looks great (well I think so, it turned out how I wanted it to) and I really like the secondary colors that were created by the overlapping primary colors.

And there is my finished piece. I made an edition of 8. 

You can seen where I ink up my matrices and each of the colored inks.

Like I mentioned this was just a test print to see if I could get this process to work before I tackled a larger print. Now that it has, I will start carving my actual piece to show in my painting class. 

Conceptual Self Portrait Finished

After many hours of painting, correcting and small scares, my conceptual self portrait print integrated with oil paint IS FINISHED!

After I printed my image I covered just the face area with gesso. The oil paint will slowly eat away the paper if I painted directly on to the paper. Over years and years mind you, but to preserve the image for a few more generations I first painted gesso in the painted areas.

The oil painting turned out better then I imagined. It was funny because as I was painting it, the whole image looked kind of creepy because the face looked really realistic and it was popping off the page out from this flat image. It was cool to see the image to come to life!

So then to make more contrast, like I did on my test proofs in my previous posts, I hand tinted the grass. I like the contrast between the flesh tints and the green.

And this is the final. Oil painted face and hand tinted integrated on to my original hand pulled print! The over all image is 18" x 14 1/2"

Conceptual Self Portrait Continued...

I have finished carving out my image and I pulled my first proof last night!

This is my matrix before I rolled it up with ink. It was kind of sad covering the image with ink because it thought the matrix itself was really good looking; I like that color green with the black from the drawing. But my sadness was short lived because there is a magical emotion deep in every printmaker's heart when they ink up their image for the first time... ah! It never gets old : D. 

Pulling the print off the press. 

And there it is, in all its glory. Now that i'm looking at it on the computer screen I think the blades of grass read better; looking at it in person the image gets busy and its hard to focus on the grass.

To fix that I experimented with some hand tinting; its just acrylic paint I thinned down with water the painted over the image. I think it looks a lot better, but I might experiment with a few more variations of green before I make my series. 

My plan is still to oil paint the face, integrating oil painting with printmaking. I will upload pictures of that soon! 

Conceptual Self Portrait Realization

Im taking a few painting classes this semester and an advance printmaking class, and the more painting I do for my classes, the more I wish I was in the print studio working on my prints, I am quickly discovering I enjoy printmaking over painting. A few weeks ago we were given our new project for one of my painting classes which was a conceptual self portrait. I began sketching ideas and thinking of ways to incorporate myself into a painting, all the while I felt this was just another assignment I had to get out of the way before I could work on the projects I wanted to do; which is primarily printmaking at this point in my life. That's when I got this idea; if this was going to be a conceptual self portrait about myself, it should reflect me even in the medium i'm using. So let me show you  my sketch for my new piece i'm working on for my self portrait. 

I wanted a piece that looked interesting and something different then what I have done before. I was surprised when this sketch came about, I wish I remembered what i was thinking about to lead me to this idea of making my hair out of grass, but the imagery I think is fun and i have some other sketches i'm working on along these same lines. 

Like I said, I thought that if I was doing a self portrait I thought it would be important that even the medium was reflected in who I feel I am. My idea is to combined printmaking and painting; printmaking because that's the medium I feel connected with, and painting because it goes along with the class and what my teachers are trying to teach me. 

I have started carving on my print now, but as I was talking with a fellow student the other day, I made a realization I thought could help other student artist. Countless times I have heard classmates say (and even more numerous I have said) something along the lines of, "I can't wait to be done with school, then I don't have to do these stupid assignments that I don't want to do," or "I just want to do what I want to do without being told by my teachers." As students we want the freedom of doing what we want and even though we learn things in our classes we take, we still maybe feel restricted because we are "in an oil painting class (or any other class as the situation may be) so I can only oil paint in this class because its a class I have to take for graduation." So my realization was: integrate your work and your style in any and all of your classes your taking. 

I bet you were all waiting for some life changing, earth spinning realization, and then you laugh or roll your eyes because of how simple it was, but even though the idea is simple, the idea is don't just do a project because that's what the assignment dictates you have to do, but own the assignment and make it your own. 

My plan for this new piece is to print this image as I normally would as a print, but I have also planned to paint the face in oil paints to fill the requirements of my oil painting class. I am excited because i'm now blurring the lines between two fields of art that I always thought were very separate and distinct. 

My wife is also taking the oil painting class with me, and she was working on some very similar ideas. My wife is a ceramic major and she was talking about making a pot that she would fired then gesso to paint her conceptual self portrait on, to integrate her passions and assignment in a similar way. 

Talking with my fellow artist friend I understand that a lot of art students may feel this way, that they want the freedom to do what they want, but feel that assignments restrict them as artists. This idea of mixing your passions in the various classes you are required to take to obtain your degree should be encouraged and maybe also realized on a personal individual level as well. Maybe this realization hit a more deeper meaning to me then to others reading this because I made it personally, and maybe in the near future it will be more personal to you because you made the realization personal too. 

Some benefits I see to integrating your personal style of art in other classes would be a stronger portfolio when applying for scholarships, jobs/careers, and higher art programs. 

That was a long winded realization, but in the upcoming posts I'll show you how my finished piece turned out. 

Weekend Paper-Making Project

My scrap paper pile began overflowing this weekend so i decided to make some new hand-made paper. I had been wanting to do this for some time but i lacked the materials. I bought a screen that was originally intended for silk screen printing, but i decided it would be a better paper-making screen. And being a cheep skate i decided to make my own deckle.

Here i just ripped up my large sheets of paper into small pieces to blend into pulp. I use cotton paper for drawing and printing primarily so all of this paper is cotton paper. I recycle my paper from old test prints and drawings that i don't want. Its also nice working in a studio with other students because i get a lot of free paper when other students leave their trash around or throw their prints away--in short, i have LOTS of scrap that i get to create into new sheet for me.

I have been playing around with colored paper. I mixed acrylic paint with the paper pulp to dye the paper. Some of the colors are nice but its worth experimenting more. Another benefit to making my own paper is, I use a lot of rice paper in my intaglio prints (its called Chine Colle) and so by making my own paper, I can make it as thin or thick as i want making it cheaper for me. 

Pulling a sheet of paper out of the water.

My first batch of paper. I have more drying but these are the first to dry, be pealed off the plexiglass and ran through the press so they're flat and ready to be used again. Im excited because the size of the paper is large enough that i could make a few good size prints or books. The paper size is about 16" x 12"