April Art! Silk-screened T-shirts for the art night posse

I think my favorite way to print t-shirts for friends is by telling them to supply me with a t-shirt (whatever size/shape/color THEY like).  I enjoy the variety that results :)

Silkscreening happened!

Silkscreening happened at my house in January!

Organized!

See? I can be an organized printmaker, if need be!

Another proof

Here's another similar card with Latvian roots that's turning into some new cards:

New prints!

Here's a proof of a new Latvian card I'm working on --- I've cleaned it up a  bit since this picture was taken and have started printing cards for Dziesmu Svetki like this:

Day 25 --- Printing cards!

Experimenting with assorted color combos and a new place for my little press:

Day 15 --- lino cut!

Sketching in lino, Part I

A couple of art nights ago I let myself just "sketch" in lino.... apparently I had bugs on the mind since both prints turned out to feature bugs. Here's the smaller of the two:



I can't figure out a consistent way to cut nice-looking circles in lino. I think I want to make friends with a dermatologist so I can appropriate one (or more) of those sharp little tools that punch out perfect circles from skin that's going to be biopsied. I bet those would work on lino.

New lino project!

I have been experimenting with printing on different surfaces. At the moment, the favorite result is the one where I print on book paper and turn it in to a card:




I am hoping to get some old Latvian books to use for this in the future, since I think printing these on Latvian text (instead of English) would just be much neater - eh?

Late March printing in my kitchen

New toy!!@!

Merry Christmas to meeeeee....



(This is going to take some practice and some getting used to ----- my first 10 attempted prints were......inconsistent, to say the least......)

Small Fish Prints

So a while back I ordered a different kind of linoleum composite to try out for printmaking and I'm sad to say that I don't really like it all that much. It's harder to cut than the stuff I was using before (though still not as hard as true battleship linoleum) and it's more likely to curl it's edges under which makes printing hard. I'm currently drying a couple blocks under a heavy weight to see if I maybe can press the curve out, but I'm not exactly holding my breath. It also seems more sensitive to ink consistency than the stuff I was using before. I was trying out a new ink that turned out to be WAY waterier than I'm used to, and that stuff printed even more poorly than the ones in this picture. hmmmm. I will still figure out a way to use them up and work with them. I hope.

The Letter "I" - Road trip exchange

Here's my print for the Four Oceans Press "Road Trip Alphabet Exchange" from this year. Sometimes plain black & white is quite nice.

Honeydew

The first print of 2009!





Created as part of Four Oceans Press' Fruit Alphabet exchange.

Card #3 of 5

Card #2 of 5

Card #1 of 5

I'm in the middle of making another set of cards. 5 designs, 8 prints of each. I think that this set will be a little more obviously a "set" than the first set of cards I did this year.

Here's the first one I finished next to the linoleum block it came from:




I may resort to random on wikipedia for names again....

Iced Tea

all the ice melted....

this one needs a title, too...

I really like how this one turned out....



Here's how it was made:

Layer 1 = yellow. I wasted a LOT of yellow ink because I wasn't thinking ahead. There is no reason that I needed to print the entire page in yellow. oh well. live and learn.



Layer 2 = adding copper in for the dandelion. Working smarter this time, I'm only rolling the ink where I know I'll want the color to be.



Layer 3 = aqua. if I could go back and do it again, I'd probably pick orange or some other warm color since the aqua disappears with the addition of the next layer



Here's what my kitchen table looked like this morning:



Layer 4 = violet, blue and white
Here's what my kitchen table looks like right now:

Hello new readers!

Some more color proofs. Turns out this new ink works a little differently than what I'd been using before... and now I have a dozen small pieces of paper that say "Hello". If you have any idea what to do with them, I'm all ears.