Planet Unicorn

I'm sure you've been wondering what I've been up to the last week or so. Quite honestly, I've been trapped on Planet Unicorn and tangled up in the never ending giant print project.

So as I explained earlier, each of our projects has three runs: a blend, a texture, and a key image. In my case, the blend and texture are on aluminum plates and the key image was drawn on the stone.

Here are some shots of my pretty blend:



Because my print is vertically oriented, I had to use a long skinny roller instead of the chunkier one. Some call it the hot dog roller, others call it the snake roller. I call it a pain in the butt.



Look at this craziness! Can you imagine how tired I was?!?!? And this is with me standing on a step stool.



I don't think I ever got around to showing you the texture plate that I made. I busted out my six flags caricature airbrush and ran gum arabic through it to create a mask. Then I sprayed over that with spray paint. The areas covered by the gum will allow the blend to show through. The spray painted areas will be inked up in white and will serve as highlights on the horse and Rodney.




Once we had our plates and stones made, we had to proof each run three or four times on different types of paper. I was a little unsure about what color I wanted to use for the key image, so in addition to different papers, I also tried different colors.

I'd originally envisioned my key image being printed in black, but I got about six different suggestions from others in the class, including Bill and Rodney. I settled on Dark Blue, Dark Purple (eggplanty), Chocolate Brown, and Black.

Here are how the four proofs turned out. I'm torn between the black and the purple... but think I'm going to end up going with black. (Sorry these photos are really bad.)




Yuli and I finished proofing sometime around the middle of the week and started editioning on Thursday. I have not been looking forward to editioning the blend AT ALL. I had a hard enough time printing four of them... let alone another 18! Needless to say, that was one of the tougher days I've had here. It wasn't that I didn't want to do it. I was just physically exhausted. I could hardly lift and rotate that three foot long roller. Here I am... so happy to be done with the very last print!



On Saturday, we came in and printed my texture plate. I didn't really have any problems with it. Some people were having issues with registration, but mine seemed to work out pretty well. I ended up adjusting the colors of my blend somewhat so that the white of the texture plate would show up better.

One final component of this project was that Rodney wants us to counter etch one of the plates or the stone and add more drawing to it. This evening I went in and added some crayon drawing to Rodney's pants, to the background, and to the unicorn's horn. I also put the Tamarind chop on the butt of the horse. Depending on how things go, we might be able to finish up this project tomorrow. I'll be very happy to have it done.

Rodney is out of town due to illness in the family and we are going to be all alone for the next week. We've been given the next assignment and are expected to get cracking on it before he gets back. I'm more than ready to move on.