CMYKin' it up

The second of three Screen Printing projects was a CMYK process-- using only photoshop, a laser printer, and four colors, we were able to create photorealistic screen prints! It is a pretty cool process, but incredibly challenging to line up. It has to be pretty darn lined up to not look crappy. I made 18 prints. Do you know how many I correctly aligned? About 4. Apparently this is common for a first try at CMYK. The image I chose was a photo taken on Glover Day 2011 in Glover, Vermont with two other ladies from the Bread and Puppet Brass Band:

The four colors are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. In photoshop, we take a photo and separate it into those four basic colors, print them out on transparencies, burn those images into the screen, and then print cyan ink on the cyan image, magenta on the magenta image, etc. They come out looking like tiny dots up close. Check it out:

So are we doing a process by hand that computers already do a lot faster with a lot more accuracy? Perhaps. But a seasoned screen printer can take this process and create new and interesting things that computers can't do. 

When I was printing, I did all the cyan layers and I was like, "ok, this looks pretty good" and then I did all the magenta layers and I was still like, "ok, still pretty cool" but then I added yellow and they totally came to life and blew my mind and I was like "YEAH!!!" It is pretty amazing how these three colors interact to make a much broader color spectrum... But then I added black and that is where the alignment issues really show up and I was like, "NOOOO!! It was an emotional roller coaster. 

When the CMYK print is not lined up correctly, like most of mine, they look like this:

This is not a blurry photograph of my print. It looks like that in person too. Up close you can see it is all a little bit off:

Some of my favorites were actually test prints that I did using only one color at a time. I wish I had done a few of those on nicer paper. They look like aged photographs. 

CMYK!

The Most Interesting Mistakes

I am finally finished with my first screen printing project! I have two more projects and one more class in which to do them before the semester ends, so needless to say, I will be going into the studio as much as humanly possible outside of class and my four jobs. But I'll think about those later. The first assignment was to create a painting and then base a screen print off of that painting. I did a super detailed painting of a tall ship which turned out to be incredibly ambitious for a first screen print. My original intent was to photograph my progress as I worked, but I never remembered to bring my camera to class, so you will just have to envision the drawn-out, multi-stepped process I went through to create this finished product. I made so many mistakes that I am pretty sure I made all of them. That's right, all of them in the whole screen printing world. No, I didn't. They are infinite. 

I seem to recall a quote from somewhere that went something like this: "Make the most interesting mistakes you can come up with! Make mistakes no one else has ever made before!" If anyone recognizes this quote and can tell me who said it, please let me know. It summed up so many of my feelings about learning to screen print. Some mistakes I made were incredibly frustrating and others actually turned out looking pretty cool. In this blog post, I want to share with you the most interesting mistakes I made. 

This first one is pretty close to flawless, so you can compare.

This second example was one of my favorite mistakes: The ink in the sky had started to dry before I did the pull with my squeegee, and it gave it a really cool, grainy texture that I love!

The sky in this one however, did not fade the way I wanted. 

It came out blocky instead:

This one is totally misaligned. Don't see it? Look at the corners.

I think it looks awesome. 

There is one weird moment on the horizon, right behind the ship. I actually like the effect, I just wish it had happened at a different place in the composition:

This one moved between the time I lined it up and the time I did my squeegee pull and my print was like, "Surprise! I put the ripples in the air!" They kinda could be clouds though, right?

...right?

This was by far my most infuriating moment. Some mistakes look great, some are salvageable, but where you get a big, ugly line of black schmutz on your horizon, there's just nothing you can do about it. 

All things considered, I deem this project a success! For the second assignment, we are using computers to print photographic images. In photoshop we break down a photo of our choosing into four basic colors: Cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The computer separates the image out according to the locations and quantities of these colors and then we print out those images onto clear acetate. Those become the images we burn into our photo-emulsion-coated screens. Then we just print those same four colors, one on top of the other and we put the photo back together. It should be a much quicker project because the computer does all the work and I get to do the fun part, which is playing with paint, which is what I studied in college. 

The image I chose for the second project is this one, 

taken during my apprenticeship at Bread and Puppet:

I have always loved this photo, because I think I look really goofy in it. 

I also love the contrast of the serious faces with the bright pink leotards. 

I think it will make a rockin' screen print!

And on that note, I hope everyone reading this blog makes some interesting mistakes of their own!

Paper Mache Extravaganza

My latest project is finally finished-- Paper mache carousel horses for a float in the Bunker Hill Day Parade in Charlestown. They are super horse-tastic and colorful and fun! Making them turned out to be way more time intensive than I thought they were going to be. I probably spent nine or ten hours per horse.  I started with newspaper and tape structures (in the photos is the balcony off of my bedroom, where I was working):

I used paper mache made from an official bread and puppet recipe:

Soon, the horses got legs and I like to think that they became friends through this whole process.

And here they are completed and waiting to be picked up on my front steps!

Happy Bunker Hill Day!

I am eating Insomnia Cookies!

I am eating Insomnia Cookies.

They are cookies that you order like a pizza and they deliver them hot and gooey, right to your door. This is the best idea ever. I have nothing else to say about Insomnia Cookies besides: yes.

Oh and here are some more drawings I did at Bread and Puppet for the cheap art bus:

Vermont Paintings

While I was apprenticing at Bread and Puppet, we spent one evening down the road at The Museum of Everyday Life checking out a great exhibit on matches, drinking Long Trail beer, and getting devoured by mosquitoes. Once it got dark, we settled on the lawn in front of a makeshift movie screen (read: sheet) and watched a film from the 1960's by Jack Smith. I had never heard of Jack Smith before, but learned that he was a contemporary of Andy Warhol. They did collaborations and things but Jack Smith was against using consumer culture as a vehicle for his art the way Warhol did, so he is not nearly as well known, but he should be! His work is a little bit elusive because he tried very hard to make it unable to be reproduced, but some recordings are available anyway.

The film we watched was called Normal Love and there may have been a plot, but I wasn't too concerned with that. I was too focussed on what a cool sensory experience I was having-- It seemed to me that it was almost like many paintings in motion. I loved the music as well. Here is a few minutes of Normal Love that I was able to find on youtube:

It was like watching beautiful image after beautiful image lit up on this square in the middle of a very dark, mountainy Vermont landscape with a ton of stars. I wanted to imprint that image on my brain so that I could paint it when I had access to my oil paints.

So that is what I have been doing. I started out using film stills and movie clips from Normal Love that I found online and then started transitioning to filling the movie screens with my own images. It is a series-in-progress, and so if any artists out there in internet land wanna throw some constructive criticism my way, I would be grateful.

I wish the image quality had been better on the owl one. Alas! I have a couple more in the works.

The following has nothing to do with Vermont or Bread and Puppet or Jack Smith, except that those experiences are getting me inspired to paint again, which has led me to finish up some projects that I let fall by the wayside. I wanted to post those as well.

This first one is a landscape from Ithaca.

And this next one is a nightscape I did waaaaaay back at Earlham and never finished. I still don't know if I would call it finished, but I am certainly done with it.

Three cheers for painting!

The Weirder the Better

One of the best things that came out of Bread and Puppet for me was inspiration. It was excellent to get away from home and meet so many other creative people. I noticed that a lot of other artists among the apprentices worked in a particular way, which is planning out their end result a whole lot less than I do. When I'm drawing (with pen) I usually make a sketch first and then ink it. So many people who worked with pen at Bread and Puppet just went for it. I really, really liked that idea so I gave it a shot and it completely rocks. It is a lot more spontaneous and whatever comes out of your brain just comes out. I've noticed that when I work with pen, a lot of what I do is cute. And I am tired of cute. Drawing in ink without sketching first is pushing my drawings to a much more interesting place, I believe.

Something else I noticed about a lot of the work that other apprentices were making is that the imagery was often totally creepy. That's a good thing. There was a lot of distorted bodies, oozy shapes, people eating things, penises, darkness, dismemberment, jars full of eyeballs, hair, things that blurred the line between beautiful and grotesque... It was AWESOME. I love weird. I want more of that in my world. It's gonna happen. Especially since I began collaborating with Leda, who is a really amazing artist and Bread and Puppet apprentice from New Zealand and who comes up with a lot of ideas I would never have thought of, but that's what collaborating is all about, eh?

Leda and I wrote stories and swapped them, then illustrated each other's stories. We fully intend to continue this exchange through international post. I wrote her a really long story about a woman named Elsa who has no legs (Leda's edit) and doesn't wear clothes. She goes on many adventures and then meets Bart, a flautist with a hat. They fall in love and live happily for several years until he pressures her into wearing a shirt so she leaves him. The story Leda wrote is about an old woman who shows up on the narrator's front porch in a very mysterious and surreal way. These are the illustrations I did for it. Guess at which point I stopped doing pencil sketches beforehand:

I sadly do not have photos of the artwork Leda did for the story I wrote, but I do have a picture of some earrings she made me that I now wear constantly:

Sometime in the final two weeks of the apprenticeship, she told me to draw a man eating a man eating a man eating a man and this is what came out:

This was really fun to draw. Really, really fun to draw.

Yup, I dig drawings that are creepy and weird and spontaneous. 

Weird is good for you.

Bread and Puppet Apprenticeship

I am back in Ithaca after the 5-week apprenticeship at Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont. My brain is still transitioning. I spent the end of June and all of July living on a farm with no cell phones or internet access. I loved it. Loved, loved, loved it. It feels very strange to be blogging about an experience that introduced me to a lifestyle that was so alternative to the excess of technology in our culture.

To sum up my time there I will say that I was surrounded by a vibrant, creative, and diverse group of artists, puppeteers, musicians, and performers. We had a busy and, for me, exhausting schedule of parades, circuses, pageants, rehearsals, experimental dance and music, cooking, cleaning, and artistic projects. Also some really, really, really good parties. Sleep? Sometimes.

Peter Schumann started Bread and Puppet back in the 60’s in New York City. He and his wife, Elka and their family moved the theater around over the years and eventually settled into the farm, which is their current location. A barn that was built in the 1800’s is now a home for their museum of historic puppets. The puppets are mostly made of paper mache and range in size from masks or painted cardboard shapes to the giant Mother Earth puppet that takes more than twenty people to operate. Everything at Bread and Puppet is a surface for art: walls, fields, forests, bodies. Everyone helps with everything. The shows are very political and it was wonderful to learn about theater and puppetry as activism-- there are so many ways that art can be used for social change and it was pretty eye opening to see it in action.

As a side note, Peter is almost 80 and still gets up on twenty-foot tall stilts at every circus and wakes up at the crack of dawn to make fresh loaves of bread every morning. What a BAMF.

Here are some photos I took of Bread and Puppet:

I didn’t actually take many photos because I was always involved in things that were happening. To take photos, you have to not be the one doing the thing you’re taking the photo of. If you want to see more pictures of performances, I highly recommend checking out Mark Dannenhauer’s photography. His photos are spectacular!

In the spare moments we had for our own projects, I did quite a few small art pieces, mostly watercolors and drawings. Aside from landscapes, which are pretty normal for me, I started doing quick watercolor portraits of other apprentices. I am getting really interested in faces, so I was exploring that interest. I only brought watercolors with me to Vermont, but I am hoping to turn some of these into inspiration for oil paintings, so here you go:

Coming soon:

Artistic collaborations with Leda.