Brianna's Got Her Gun. Stone Lithography For Ben Moreau's Lithography Class 2011 At WWU.

Brianna's Got Her Gun. Stone Lithography for Ben Moreau's lithography class 2011 at WWU.

Goddamn I hate lithography. I have no patience for a medium that precludes sketching and re-working, which you may find amusing as I am happily hacking away at another block of irrepareable linoleum. but by the time I'm carving a block I know about exactly what I want the lines on it to do and where the spot-darks and highlights are going to dance with the white-space-that-release the-pressure-of-dark and the false printing that makes the whites human again.

I'm not sure if I can explain putting whites in to release pressure, but the idea that that was why I was doing it already, came out of learning about PNW native art which uses that principle to keep things from getting too heavy. not sure how else I can explain it with out looking like a person pointing at pictures tacked to my wall and linked by string.

anyway, this iconic-as-all-hell image was originally, and best, as a photograph my uncle took of my cousin in her prom dress. this image was apparently helpful in my entrance into the BFA program because Garth liked it. but, man I hate lithography.

hate it.

so begins the uploading of the pictures I take with the computer's camera of the art I make.

this is from a request heard from a few of you, no wait, all of you. a unanimous grandma wish to see more of my art. well there you go.

it is playing as a slideshow. if you want to stop it so you can look at a particular picture look at the bottom right of the picture-window. it has a little three button control pad. click once on in the middle that looks like a pause button (looks like this: ||  ) to stop the slide show, click it again so it looks like a triangle to make it go again.

the other buttons select forward and back.

I know this sounds like I'm being too explanatory, you are all on the internet, you are all grownups, I just want you guys to know how to use this blog so you can see the cool stuff I'm posting for you.

I made enough of these to give one to each member of the Pigeon Vision Collective (here depicted baked into a cozy pigeon pie) and still keep one for myself.

this is a two color jigsaw-print made from the better elements of my second print, and the better fish from my first one. the plates were cut to fit each other and then the black background was inked and fitted into a jig, the fish was inked in a dark red and then fitted into place and the whole thing was printed together.

I only made one of these because it was a hassle and I mostly wanted to see if it could be done. it stands as a good example of my fish-phase.

so, in my life I am both the eldest sister of two, and one of two hulkingly larger step sisters. there is no good fairytale about a person in my situation in life. eldest daughters either don't do shit, fail and are cursed, or die horribly.

this is because with large families the youngest is an ever shifting downward slope of kids who get less and less parental attention. they need to feel they have a chance at one-upping somebody in life because what else have they got?

anyways, I've also got kind of a mouth on me, I swear and I say the thing that everybody is thinking but nobody else is going to say because it would be rude or awkward. but if stuff like that is kept inside it helps absolutely nobody, so I'm all about living above board and straightforwardly, and while I don't lie, I can't keep a secret either.

it just all comes out at once.

this was made as a solarplate intaglio image, that means the original image was drawn in pencil on a piece of semi transparent drafting film (allowing me one again to utilize a photograph and trace it out) this film was then applied and used to expose the solarplate through a UV light. the solarplate then washed out and was printed the same as a normal intaglio. I did not know at the time that with this process I did not have to crosshatch. oh well.

ok, so this piece is one that I am still fairly proud of, it is just a printed digital photograph of me man-handling a bright orange saddleback gunnel, but I managed an edition of six and no major fuckups and that's pretty big for me.

you can't really hold these guys, they have to want to hang out on your hand, but they're pretty friendly and so they did want to hang out on me fairly often when we cleaned the tanks, although I don't think Noel my boss was too happy with me sticking my hand in the tank and taking this shot.

interesting note, I was a good volunteer at the marine Life Center partly because my hands do not get cold very fast so I could spent a lot of time with my hands in the tanks, either holding fish for visitors to pet, or more often whilst cleaning tanks.

back on topic, this print was my first exposure to using CMYK processes, the image itself was a digital image, which was split into CMYK channels (I used vibrance and some other things to beef up the colors first, it was a little more dull originally and I was worried about that getting muddy and lost)  and then each channel was made into it's own individual image, and converted into a bitmap to make it into ben-day dots each image with a particular orientation of dots so that they did not overlap but were next to one another. this was then printed via laser printer onto four plastic sheets and then ink was applied to the sheets and then the paper through a process marginally resembling lithography.

the ink on each plate only stuck to the places where there was already black toner, and I learned that in printing CMYK is both a description of the inks used, and the order in which they must be applied. cyan is darker/more visible, than magenta or process yellow, and so putting it down first allows the printmaker to align the subsequent colors more easily.

because I managed to do every step correctly and accounted well for my time this was one of the best of these in my class, which is a surprise, because any of the photography students could have (I hope anyway) crapped out a better color photograph in their sleep, they all however, opted to get creative in their process.

if there is a thing I have learned as a printmaker it is this thing, trust your process and be diligent. I can't always do it, but I think I did ok here.