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Saturday, November 21, 2009

blue underwater lights and bright stars

The water heaters were being replaced, so I had to wait a bit for my shower. Piled all my things for the weekend. I am almost getting better at pairing down the supplies I think I need for visits.

Katie was cleaning hardcore. Apartment will be all nice and shiny. For a week.

It was raining as I departed, but it wasn't so bad. Waited for streetcar, got to the station at a good time. Didn't have to wait around forever to board. Got an aisle seat. I read a chapter out of Dylan Dog, bought my standard train hot dog with mayo, mustard, and ketchup. Then I took a nap for a couple hours. I didn't think I napped for that long, but I woke up to mom calling me at 4:30. Train ended up getting into Tacoma a bit late.

Mom took me, Nate, and Rubie out for dinner at a nice little place in Tacoma. It was uhh some dude & some dude. I don't remember the name. Fish and meat mostly. Rubie and I both had Mojito's, ma and brother stuck to water. The mojito was tasty tasty. My grilled steak salad was enjoyed, except for the steak which took too much effort to cut. The onion rings and salad part was quite good. My portion was gigantic compared to the others, and I think mine was the cheapest. After eating, we played some Wii. I mostly lost, except at Wii Golf.

After the drive home, mom and I got in the hot tub. Just perfect. It is a really fabulous unit. Huge and better than the one at the Bremerton athletic club. And it has a great view of the stars. Mmm, nice.

Friday, November 20, 2009

I'm so ready for that hot tub

Ohhhh man, yoga really ran me over. I felt so sore and beat the whole day. Anyway.

Got my images ready for class like a good girl. We had a run down of where we all are, and we are all pretty awesome. Loaned Madeline my copy of Raw Shark Texts. Gave her a little drawing for her birthday.

It was a work day. During lunch I put emulsion on my screen and loitered in the print lab while it dried. Katie came in and we gabbed. I showed her the exposing room. Cool stuff. I left my screen to dry and returned to class. Worked on digital stuff.

Finished my digital version and printed it out. Martin ordered me to do another illustration, seeing as how I had the time. So I worked on finishing up the other one and printing it out. Ha.

At around 5:20 I returned to the print lab and found Mark and uhh oh dang I forgot his name. The boys working in the lab last night. They were in the lab and Heather was showing them how to stretch a screen. So I jumped to get a piece of that action. Ripped the silk off the screen that had the razor accident in the drying room. The stretching process is a combination of hydraulics, metal bars, silk, and glue. It's pretty cool and the hydraulic operation box looks like cheap sci-fi with it's two knobs and two gauges. And it is all sky blue. So yeah, I inhaled some intense glue fumes and we three got our screens stretched. Looks all shiny and new. Now I have three proper screens, and one wooden one. Heather was talking about how she has so many screens because she just takes old frames and stretches them. $10 for a great screen, versus the $30-$40 it costs to get one ready made. Whoo whooo!

Then I printed the first layer of my rain piece. There is so much printing to be done on it. Heather even gave me some of her left over mylar so that I could use it for registering the small details (otherwise I would be hefting a big piece of mylar back and forth for each print, and that just bogs down the process). It pays to hang out and be friendly in the print lab. I had a great time talking with Heather, who told me the origin of the Christmas tree. I made sure to reuse some of the left over ink for my printing (she was going through all the ink and sorting through it).

I got out of there at around 8pm. Went to Safeway to pick up dinner and train snacks. Theatre size candy was one for a dollar. Runts, Gobstoppers, and Nerds oh my! Got Sushi and Perrier and cheese puffs and tried to find corn nuts but had no luck. Outside the store, I had a chat with another biker about how awesome helmets are.

It is really believable how tired I am. Lots of roaming, lots of bumping into things, lots of work, and biking here and there.

Oh, I also collected a file of the best of my kitten and cat photos for Samala (she is doing a plague of cats piece). Sent them to her for reference. Afterward I thought "oh crap, there are pictures of my family members in there, she will realize we all are crazy, not just me." I hope I can see a little bit of Basil in one of her 30 cats.

Just relaxed. Ahh. So nice. Sushi was good, even though it was just Safeway.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Rain - Red Umbrella



Photoshop.

if both knees are bad, do they both become good again?

Moved on to the Lenny Bruce segment of History of Laughter. First there was some discussion about the breakdown of communication due to technology (I agree on the idea that the easier it is to say things, the less important those things are). Discussed...more stuff. Yeah.

Today, I wore this shirt Celia gave me way back around 8th grade. Red with wild prints. I love it. It is loose and stands out, which you think wouldn't happen in a place as wacky as art school. But there is a set system to how to combine prints, and big floppy actual 90's shirts are not in that system. Normally it is a boho dress or some torn tights under a patterned skirt. Flannel everywhere, but not old school flannel. Just as a print, not the real deal. Anyway, I love the shirt and got many comments on it. I took them for compliments.

Lacey and her blues dancing crew were giving a demonstration in the commons. She brought cute boys and one, Andrew, asked me to dance. I sort of moved through one song then went for Quizno's. Diana really cut a rug on the cement floor. She danced with all the boys (all three of them). It was a jolly lunch.

Some prints from the Schnitzer collection were on loan to us for today. 60's minimalism mostly, with some Josef Albers thrown in there. Really top notch stuff in name; only about half the pieces held my interest. But it was productive and insightful. Some of the other printmaking classes joined us in our learning. Morgan told a story of how some guy he met in the gym said that he looked like an artist and this led to Morgan meeting him at his place to look at his art work. The guy lived in a purple house with no floors and they had to line his huge paintings outside along the fence and the peacocks came out to be fed. All the while it was snowing. Morgan says that experiences like that are why you should 1) say yes and take a chance and 2) be an artist. He said that things like that just seem to happen to artists. Maybe because we pay enough attention to realise what is going on? Or maybe we would appreciate it more. There is more to the story buy I can't disclose it here.

I had to loaf around for two hours waiting for the print lab to be free enough to print. In the downtime I cut my paper down. I'm doing a huge edition to make up for the fact that I'll probably lose a few just to me not caring enough. Well I do care. I need to get good practice, but registration is such a bother.

In an hour and a half (between the class getting out and yoga) I: applied emulsion, put an image onto the screen, exposed the screen, washed the unexposed emulsion off the screen, let it dry, mixed a color, set up my station, and printed the some 40-50 prints. About 30 are at 8"x10" and 15 are 8"x6" or whatever. The image I was printing today is 8"x8". It is on tan paper and I used a transparent brown. I will layer the brown and make a nice soft toned image in keeping with the aesthetic I utilized with the Katie with Jade Plants piece. I didn't get an exact count of the numbers. 6x6=36. Ohh. Wow I should have just bought five sheets of paper. Ha, oh well. 36 8x10 and (lets see, 3 8x6 a sheet, 6 sheets, 6x3 is...) 18 8x6 prints. That's a lot of art. Whoo! Enough for the edition, and if I am lucky, I'll get some stuff in the Holiday Art Sale for the first time.

The Holiday Art Sale is an annual sale where students put their work in the commons and people can buy it right on the spot. The paintings are crowded on the wall and there are tons of cool prints and goodies to purchase. Good for last minute gifts. I've always slacked on getting things in it, but now I actually have a reasonable stock of things.

I think I forgot to mention that I slipped in the print lab yesterday. I was wearing my Romeo's and those shoes have no traction left on the bottom. There are tons of puddles of water around the studio left from people moving wet screens about. I stepped in one and my foot went out from under me and I hit the cement floor with full force on my good knee. It hurt but I got up and went back to what I was doing. The bruise isn't so bad, and it isn't really all that injured. Just when yoga came around tonight, it kicked my butt. I couldn't do anything that required strength in my left leg.

I can bike just fine though. Caught a little bit of rain coming back, but nothing too hostile. Relaxed. Ate food. Drew a little something something for Madeline's birthday. Drew the stencils for my silkscreen project for illustration. I drew them at relatively small scale, and I will see how they look blown up. I'm excited for this project. Just sucks that there is a print class in the studio on Thursday. Boo!!

And I can't print Friday because I am going home for So You Think You Can Dance! Yaay! I haven't watched the elimination episode, no spoilers.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

screenprint season begins

Getting to an entry at a reasonable time. Whoo!

Monotype introduced a "rainbow roll" which is when you roll up several colors on one roller. That way you can get a nifty gradient on your plate. Whee! For the first half of class, Phil and I collaborated. We did two images with his backgrounds and my stencils. First one we tried to put the ink over the stencil and that proved most difficult. Mainly because Phil didn't quite figure that it would be best to put the stencils LAST. But it was an experiment. It had a different look than regular cutouts. Still neat, but not perfect. Then we did one of Ahab going after the whale. A combination rainbow roll + stencil + multiple layers. It was okay.

Then we went our separate ways. I did another stencil image. Just this one girl on a rainbow roll. The paper was bumped on the plate so I got a double line. Not perfect. Bah. Oh well. Cutting out the stencils takes so long.

Got my schedule. I am in all the classes I signed up for. Go me. confirmed for intermediate silkscreen: Diana & Patsy.

After class I hung around in the studio and kept Cherish company while she printed. I also bought another screen because I realized there was no way I could do the print final AND illustration piece with one good high mesh count screen and one low count mesh screen. And since I am taking intermediate silkscreen, it is probably for the best that I have another one. Yay for new clean never used screen! Cherish's screen is so used.

Went home. Ate an apple. Ate some pasta. Wow, where did the last four hours go?

Anyway, I think I will do the silkscreen for print using the reductive method. I can get started on it tomorrow and hopefully print the first color. Just need to get paper.

Also need to think of Christmas presents for the people back home. What would you guys like? Art? Okay, art it is!

bad poems

Ahk, how did it get to be 1:36am? Well, I don't have to actually roll out of bed till 10, but still. Day after that I get up at 7. Bah.

Okay.

Narrative Image critique: check. It went well, just minor suggestions. Danny brought in a piece with some hot dogs that made us all hungry. It's interesting to know the mediums one goes to when forced to work on short notice. I've done a lot of ink and watercolor, no digital yet because digital printing is such a fuss.

Before lunch, the people who hadn't read their flash fiction read theirs. Then it was food time! And food on days when I didn't pack a lunch beans: Burrito! Chipotle! A meal that lasts me all day.

Talked with Robyn and Rachel and then did the things that needed printing out. Unfortunately I forgot that we needed a poem for when we got back to class. A poem we liked. I would have done with one about rain, but oh well. I've done all my work so one little poem flub ain't no thing. We spent an hour struggling to write poetry and then we did some weird writing exercise using found text. That is, creating poetry using terms and words we find in other sources. My favorite was:

When will I die?
When will the world end?
When does New Moon come out?

I came up with it by entering "When..." into Google and forming a narrative based on the automatic fill in that Google does.

Then class got out and I read an article in Esquire about this hippie commune/video production team. They made this video:

Then I took a nap. Then it was time for yoga! Only three people in it today. Did a lot of warming exercises.

Nick, Katie's friend, had made dinner. Yay! Chicken and pasta and sauce! And I got some because they used my pasta and my sauce. Fair trade I say.

In the mail, we got a large mysterious cardboard flat package. The gold spray paint and fancy lettering could only indicate one sender: Karen Berger. We opened it to find a Hammerpress 2010 Calendar! Probably printing by our beloved sassy lady in the KC. Oh my god so AWESOME! We can't wait to put it up. It is soooo cool. It has a great design and a lovely little month tear sheet.

House was good. Exciting character developments. Then I put in Showgirls to inspire me to start my printing final. I have her face all drawn out. Now I'm not sure how I will progress. I'll screenprint it sure, but I might change how I do the layers. Thankfully I'm printing such a small area. Only 8"x8" on a 8"x10" piece of paper.

Finals time is here. Project list:
-extend a previous Narrative Image assignment
-monotype something (I don't know what our final quite is, or if we even have one)
-write a paper for History of Laughter most likely
-print piece for the class portfolio in History of Print
-finish current illustration piece + final illustration assignment
and somewhere in all that, I'll have to document it all. Not actually so bad in terms of finals. Last spring semester was hardcore.

Monday, November 16, 2009

the scent of ripped out perfume ads

Another late Sunday night.

Got up at noon three days in a row. It's nice.

Katie came back from her wedding. We watched Misery together and ate breakfast. Good movie. Very tense. Kathy Bates was perfect as a deranged fan. While working on homework, we watched The Good Son. Early Elijah Wood and Macaulay Culkin movie. Not very good. High points in creepy though. Then I watched the new AMC remake of The Prisoner. Decent enough premier. I shall watch more. All in all, a lot of weird and creepy things watched. Best of them was Misery.

My painting is okay. I don't like bristol paper for watercolor, but it isn't worth it to buy better stuff. The poetry packet was interesting, though I mistook some of the descriptions as poetry (but maybe they were, oooohhhh). Did some drawings.

Yeah. My eyes hurt. I want to go to sleep, even though I have been staying up late. Another week. Then it is So You Think You Can Dance! Then Thanksgiving break! I have to get on top of things NOW because if I don't before next weekend, I'll run out of time, yeah.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

movie posters







Some cool posters, none of which I made.

yaawn

The the sketch for my Narrative Image piece. It looks pretty cool. I'm looking forward to painting it tomorrow. Mostly ink.

I like Sunday because I just get up and get stuff done. Not going out because it's Sunday. Saturday feels like I should be doing something, but I just do nothing.

Watched Thirst. Korean vampire movie. If you don't like the sound of people chewing and slurping their food, this is not the movie for you.

Tea. Toast. Pasta. Apple. Banana. Cookies. Peppered salami. Fed Luna.