Horse printed and Craft fair

Greetings from rainy Dupont. Its been one of those on again/off again weeks with rain. We even had a nice little snowstorm a couple of weeks ago. It's been pretty amazing that every time I have taken our dog out for a walk, the weather has always been nice. God's pretty cool in the little things he does to bring sunshine in our day.

After arriving home from TX I had the Tacoma is For Lovers craft/art fair the very following weekend. I had time to sew a couple of things for one half of my table, and then I had prints on the other half. Here are a couple of shots from the very Valentine's day themed fair:

Here is what else I spied from around me. If you live in Tacoma area, the TIFL fairs are really worth making it to. The wares are affordable and there is so much variety. I will really miss going to them after our move. My table was next to Laurie Cinotto's. She has the most wonderful things made from paper. As a printmaker, how can I resist! Of course I did not take a picture of her table, but you can see her beautiful things at her website. I already had one pin, and had to splurge on another one as well. I also ended up getting a pair of earrings from Maija McKnight, who does equally beautiful jewelry (and who, of course, I did not get a picture of either...).

So after a busy week of sewing for the fair and unpacking after the trip, I got a chance to print the horse plate at a local high school with a small printshop. The press was a nice Conrad Machine press. Mental note, the day when I save enough money for my own nice press, make sure it has gear reduction drive in it. I was breaking a sweat and growing biceps like Paul Bunyan cranking the plate back and forth though the press 40x !

As you can see from the picture above, I was using a sheet of mylar for registration. That always works well for me. I have dried my prints by now, but am hesitating signing them, because I am not quite sure if I want to add watercolor in the effect of chine colle, and have a light yellowish background for the whole print area. I like the effect of setting the print apart from the border that way, but its a pretty big area to cover uniformly, so I can't decide if I can handle the agony of trying to manage it. Should have thought of it before I printed... We'll see.

I also took down the last exhibition I had in Kent last week. Now I have two more classes to teach and 10 more illustrations and I can finally pack my bags and move. We are having a lot of trouble because of Army bureaucracy, but I hope it will be ironed out in the next couple of days before it gets too late. I am still waiting for the interview I've been promising, but in the mean time I have a guest writer share some tips on polymerplate printing (intaglio style). Excited about that. Have a great week, Nappi (our dog) wishes you a happy early spring!

San Antonio Print Crop

I have arrived back in Washington from Texas! It's good to be back home, my own bed, a loving husband, a terrific dog, home cooked meals and working in my own studio. I have the "Tacoma is For Lovers" craft fair at King's Books this weekend so I will try to get some sewing done for a change. Before I left for two weeks I had gotten some very nice Japanese fabrics to sew stuff from. Can't wait to get my hands on those.

Back to TX- The trip to San Antonio was a great deal fun. I finished 4 plates and printed 3 editions (the last one I'll have to print at home), I was able to talk to over 10 classes about what I do as printmaker, help some students become better at printing and see some old friends and spend time with them. How can it get any better than that. The first print I finished was that two color reduction linocut (see previous post). For the second color I mixed a dark brown ink and printed that on top of the first lighter brown. It looked good so I went ahead and printed the edition.

Here is how it turned out, it is printed on Fawn colored stonehenge paper. The color is a light grayish brown. Below it is also a detail of one of the deer. I quite like the way this one turned out, but my favorite print from the trip is yet to come.

If you haven't been to TX, let me tell you they really do have lots of deer. I stayed over one of the weekends at a friends house, and they had a whole herd (?) of deer in their front yard. Here's the two last to leave, a mommy and it's baby. The deer were quite tame, we were really close, I only had a little point and shoot with me to take this picture with.

After finishing the first linocut, I had about 5-6 workdays left. I was not sure how long things would take, so I wanted to work on a mini etching. A friend suggested I do a print with an armadillo, since I was in TX, so I figured why not.

The plate was printed twice for this edition. First I inked it up with black and printed it as a regular line etching. Then after the whole edition was done, I went back and relief rolled a light beige color on and used a q-tip to clean out the armadillo and mouse and then that got printed on top of the line etching for the chine colle look-a-like effect. The plate measures about 2.5" tall. Should have put a quarter next to the piece...

So after finishing "Tank" I had a couple more days to work. I figured I would do another mini plate, with the leftover paper I had. (I brought my own paper to print on, so I knew not to overpack on the way down.) This little guy is about the same size as the armadillo. I was thinking of other ways animals could hassle humans as they fight to get their land back from sprawling suburbs (the current theme in my work) and thought of swallows- they live everywhere and I am always afraid one day one will miscalculate and I'll have a big gash in my head. So was born the Dive Bomber print. I gave him some war paint for the extra twist. Hope you like it. The red highlights and beige background color were added with watercolor. Both the armadillo and swallow are created with repeated line etches on top of each other to get the desired gradation from light to dark.

I had one more day in the print shop before I had to go. Now what, I am just about out of paper, and have no time to edition anything any more, but I am no one to just sit around and twiddle my thumbs... I figure since I've been working so hard, I can do what ever I want- and this time I felt like I just wanted to draw a horse.

The etching is based on a photo and drawing and it ended up taking the last work day (12hrs) in the studio. I wanted it to be an excellent piece as far as technique was concerned, since the subject matter wasn't necessarily very high-arty (I made up a new word!). We had visited a museum in San Antonio and I had learned of three woman printmakers- Beth Van Hoesen, Andrea Rich and Mary Bonner. All of them did splendid animal prints, and I was very inspired to make my own. I'll have to do some book reports on them soon. ;-) So here is the last proof of the horse, I called her Faithful, she looked like a good horse. I really liked how the plate turned out and hope to print the edition off of it in the following weeks when I can get on a press big enough somewhere. The plate is about 6"x8" and my little press at home won't print that.

This print uses both line etching and soft ground for the tonal values. You can see the lines in the detail, and the soft ground crayon-like lines in the highlight in the top left corner. All the prints I finished will eventually be in my Etsy store. If you can't wait or they would make a great gift for someone right now, just contact me and we can work it out.