Sensitizer

Back in the studio this week cranking out prints. I finished this mexican donkey and another one and then got all my screens emulsified and ready to print again. I bought a bunch of screens over the holiday so now I have twelve. This is going to make finishing work go much quicker. I'm about to buy a big bucket of emulsion too, just to make sure I have it when the studio's bucket runs dry or mysteriously disappears. I bought a small quart container but when I opened it to mix in the sensitizer I found out that the emulsion was a solid mass of jelly. I'm not sure if that happened because it got too cold during shipping or what. I'm going to try sending it back. We saw Up in the Air tonight and I really liked it but it is pretty sad. Oh, yeah, I just posted a new show at Captive Werewolf.

Block Printing

I started my block printing workshop at Feed last Monday. My plan was to work on a design or drawing on the first session, start carving on the second and finish up on the third week by pulling a few prints. Things went faster than I thought and everyone was already carving on their blocks before the end of the first session. Since things were moving so quickly, I decided to make it a multiple color project. I took my block home to make sure it was finished so I can demonstrate printing and setting up the second block for registration next week. Tonight I pulled a proof off the block.

If anybody wants to join in, I'm willing to push the workshop a week longer for new folks. We'll be starting next Monday at around five.

Art House Sketchbook

I finally finished up this moleskine for Art House Co-op's Sketchbook Project. I've been dragging my feet on it since I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I'm not really much of a sketcher and I didn't actually want to spend a huge amount of time filling pages with drawings and then just send the book away and never get it back. In the end, I replaced all the thin pages with more substantial ones, to which I attached small manila envelopes filled with prints of photographs. It isn't the most elaborate thing I could have done, but in the end, it looks clean and nice. Since I waited so long, the book won't make it in time for the January 4th deadline, but I think it will be fine anyway. Art House is planning to send the entire library of sketchbooks created for the project on a traveling exhibit across the country. Right now there are shows scheduled for Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Saint Louis.

A Decade

Happy new year. Here's what I've been up to this week.

The print studio has been closed for the holidays, so I've just been trying to get a bunch of color separations ready for when I can get back in there. I really wanted to keep all the prints down to 10 colors, however, some of the photos look so much better at 12 or 13 that I feel like I have to do the extra work.

Michael and I finished painting the walls at Feed last Monday. The white really looks a lot better than the yellow that was there before. I've also been getting ready for my blockprinting workshop by ordering supplies and researching images to show as examples of printing methods.

All the portfolios for the Littlest Print Exchange were shipped out a few weeks ago and have hopefully arrived by now. I posted scans of all the prints for the world to see and put up an exhibit of some of those prints at Captive Werewolf. I'll show the entire portfolio at Feed one of these days and hopefully put together a show of them at the GSU gallery as well. This exchange will certainly become an annual event, so I'm thinking of how to make it run easier for 2010.

I'm sure I did some other things this week, but I can't think of anything right now.