SNAP!!!

Several months ago I was invited to participate in a print portfolio for the IMPACT 5 international printmaking conference in Tallinn, Estonia. The print is due at the end of the month and I'm finally making some headway. I had a bit of a creative block. Too much printing and not enough printmaking, I guess. The best I could come up with is a print about printing. It's gonna be titled, "Snap!!!" You Tamarind kids out there know what I'm talking about.



Anyway... this is going to be a Lithograph and Digital on some sorta Japanese paper chine colle'd onto somerset satin or something similar. The plate is ready and proofed, I just have to print out the digital parts onto the thin Japanese paper and we'll be ready to roll. The image area is around 8"x8" and the paper size is 12"x12".

[For those of you unfamiliar: Printmaking Portfolios are organized exchanges of prints between artists. An organizer will generally select a number of participants, a theme, a paper size and an edition size. Some themes are more open than others. In the case of my current project, we were simply given a folio title, "Analog Digital Disorder", to work from and told that the prints must be 12"x12", no thicker than 1/4", and in an edition of 27. So I will make 27 identical prints and send them to Dusty. The other 20+ participants will also send 27 prints to Dusty and he will organize them into boxes containing a copy of every print submitted. Dusty will take the portfolio with him to the conference in Estonia. He will also eventually send each participant a complete set of all the prints in the portfolio to keep.]

Since I last wrote, I finished up my solvent wash projects. Alex helped me print my stone on Thursday afternoon and Celina sponged for me this afternoon so that I could print my plate. Both of them turned out relatively well, although I was having trouble getting the black flats to print solid. Rodney said I was rolling too fast and of course he was right. I'm always in super-fast mode when I'm printing. Sometimes it's hard to slow down. I joked that I was paying for Celina's help by the hour which was why I was in such a hurry.

Thursday night I went to the mall with Alex, Celina and Valpuri. Alex left for Saint Louis this morning. We'll probably meet up there on Sunday for Ted Drewe's Frozen Custard and/or drinky drinks.

Tonight I watched the Cardinals lose (again) to the Cubs. I also worked on "Snap!!!". Patrick's Baby-Momma is in town for the weekend and they stopped by after the game. We hit the Frontier for a late snack and then took Chelsey on a tour of Tamarind. Good times.

Tomorrow morning I get picked up at 7:30am for the airport. My flight is at 9:25am. I switch planes in KC and arrive in STL around 2pm.

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Shellaccident!!!

What do you call it when you spill half a bottle of red enamel Shellac all over the press and the floor?

A SHELLACCIDENT!!!




Spiders

Okay, so I decided I'd better not leave you hanging. (That's a little spider pun for you.)

I talked to my mom Monday night for the first time in a month. I told her about my spider woes and she insisted that I tell my landlord about my little problem. Of course, this is the same thing that Carrie has been insisting since I moved in... but when it comes from your Mom, it's different somehow. Also, my Mom lives in the middle of the woods and leaves the doors open all of the time and hardly ever has spiders. Apparently, my situation is not as normal as I'd tried to convince myself.

Anyway... I emailed my landlord and he wrote me back saying that he would have a professional pest control person come out and spray for me. I guess we'll see how effective that is. I'll get back with you on that.

Baseball

The Cardinals are sucking my will to live.
I'm trying not to pin my every happiness on baseball.
But when all I do is print and watch baseball, it's kind of hard not to.

Tamarind

Things have been odd lately in the studio. I'm not quite sure if it's the project or the timeline or just the fact that people are starting to wear down a bit. I don't know how to describe it. We had a pretty good groove going and now it's just off a little bit. Maybe it's just me.

We're still keeping busy for the most part. I think part of the problem is that these tusche washes have to sit for quite a while to dry before you can do anything to them. So if you don't time things right, you can end up spending a couple of hours sitting around doing nothing. Once again... maybe it's just me.

We have now moved onto the Solvent Tusche Washes. You can use any number of solvents to reconstitute the solvent-based tusches. Normally, Rodney has the class do three tests with one type of tusche and three different types of solvents. However, our water-based projects were so crappy that he offered us the opportunity to try our favorite wash again. So our projects are turning out to be two solvent tests and a repeat of one water-based test. You can get an idea of the layout here. This is my stone with the water-based tusche applied on the bottom row.



Here is Patrick putting a gum arabic mask on his plate. The areas where the gum is applied will be resistant to the solvent washes (but not the water-based tusche washes).




The solvent washes were a lot trickier than the water based ones. I don't think they look as nice but maybe that's just because I don't know how to do it very well. Here's Alexandra applying one of her solvent tusches to her plate.



Just in case you haven't gotten enough, check out Yuli and Celina working on their stones.



I finished applying the tusches to my plate and stone yesterday and started etching them today. I was able to get both the first etch on my plate and my stone during class. I also was able to get a little bit of work done on a print for a portfolio I'm in, which was good. I left Tamarind around 4pm and went home to watch the baseball game (see above). Around 8pm, I ran to the grocery store with Celina and was back by 8:30pm to work at Tamarind some more. I had the whole place to myself and ended up staying until after midnight. Besides putting the second etch on my stone and plate, I also worked on cleaning the studio up a little bit. I've been going a little crazy from all the clutter and mess in the studio.

Cleaning a million of these made me feel a little bit better:

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Burnout

Oh please please tell me that I'm not getting burned out already. Please tell me that the lethargy I'm feeling today is just from my weekend of excitement and too much good food. Speaking of which...

After Saturday's decadent meal of pizza with green chiles, Chef Patrick struck again with some more fancy feasts on Sunday. In the morning, I got up and watched the Packers game with Wisconsin's very own Patrick Smyczek (shown here in his super-tight team colors):



While I watched the game, Patrick made me little English Muffin sandwiches with avocado, onion, tomato and cream cheese. So good!





After the Packers won (somehow), I met up with Ana and she drove me out to Trader Joes on the NE side. I didn't really have much in mind but was able to find a few things, including a Triple Cream Cheese that I took to Patrick's later that night.

Yes... Once again Patrick hosted the weekend barbecue at his house. This time it was grilled Chicken Breasts stuffed with mozzarella, tomato, onions and green chiles! The vegetarian option was a bow-tie pasta with homemade creamy pesto sauce and sauteed onions and mushrooms. Pat also grilled some vegetables (asparagus, zucchini, etc) and even fired up an acorn squash (which accidentally got left on the grill until 1:30am). To top it all off, Alex made a delicious Blueberry Cobbler and Ana brought some pumpkin cookies... both of which we smothered in ice cream.

Here are some pictures of the food. Needless to say, I'm not going hungry here.




More Spiders

I've found a lot of spiders around my front door lately (on the outside, Thank God). So I've made a habit of checking when I come home, to make sure I don't run into any. A few days ago, I found this little medium guy trying to get into my house. He was right on my doorstep, scratching at my door. I think it is a Brown Widow, but I couldn't get a good look at the underside, so I'm not entirely sure.



Then today I come home... do my usual inspection and find a freakin' BLACK WIDOW hanging out near the bottom of my door at the hinges. I didn't really know what to do. I didn't want to kill it. I didn't want to get near it, really. But I had to go inside... and it was in a spot where if I opened the door, it was sure to come inside with me. And it did! Blech.

I was feeling a bit sad about having to kill so many spiders lately. And I really didn't want to have to kill the Black Widow. But it FOLLOWED ME IN THE HOUSE! I had no choice. I grabbed my trusty 20 year old can of Ant and Roach killer and sprayed it until it was rolling around in circles on my tile floor. Once it stopped moving I stuck it in a Ziploc so I could get a closer look (also because I'm creepy like that). I tried to scan it for you, but the weight of the scanner lid proved to be too much. Yuck. Well, at least you can see that I'm not entirely crazy. If that isn't a Black Widow, I don't know what is.



Printing

Things are still busy on the Tamarind front. Today I was scheduled to sponge all day on the Pro-Side, but I was able to get out of it for the most part. (Thank you Myungwon!) I helped Alex finish printing her first edition from the stone and we worked on getting our stones and plates ready for the next part of the project (solvent washes).

The Cardinals played a make-up game versus the Cubs at Wrigley Field and they totally blew their opportunity to make up some ground in the NL Central. They've now dropped four straight games... Maybe that's why I'm feeling so down today.

To cheer me up, Ana played X-Men in the graining room.

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How Could I Forget?!?!

I'm going home next weekend!!!!
I'm going home next weekend!!!!
I'm going home next weekend!!!!

Yay! Yay! Yay!

Okay... a little background.

First of all, two of the other people in my program are making trips to Saint Louis in the next few weeks. I started thinking:

"WHY-IS-EVERYONE-GOING-TO-SAINT-LOUIS-BUT-ME!?!?!?!"

At some point last week, a Southwest Airlines DING! Fare came up from Albuquerque to Saint Louis. I was thisclose to getting a ticket then but I decided to wait. I didn't want to impulse purchase a plane ticket. Especially since Carrie is coming here shortly after the beginning of October. So I resisted.

But I just couldn't resist it when it popped up again a few days later. It was just too tempting. How could I possibly pass up a $130(+tax) roundtrip plane ticket to STL? It's impossible.

My printing partner, Alex, is one of the people going to Saint Louis. She'll be leaving on Friday morning, which means we have to get our projects printed before the weekend anyway. So what was I going to do all weekend besides sit around and be jealous of Alex because she's in Saint Louis and I'm not? PROBLEM SOLVED!

If it sounds like I'm still trying to convince myself that this is a good plan, you're probably right. But I'm really quite excited about the trip. In addition to seeing Carrie I will be getting my hair cut and possibly going to a Cardinals-Cubs game. (BEST WEEKEND EVER!) If anyone reading this wants to see me you should drop me a line.

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