Tucson Sketches

A couple of weekends ago I visiting my sister Anna in Tucson and I got a little taste of her exciting, busy, circus arts, desert hiking, moped-riding, Mexican food, hula hooping life! These are my sketches from the trip. The first is the outside of a venue where my parents and I watched her perform with her fellow Cirque Roots people!

While I was sitting outside drawing before the show started, lots of people came up to ask me about information for the performance. My customer service/front of house vibes must be very strong.  The tickets were by donation and a few people asked if I was the one taking donations. It was tempting to tell them, why yes, you can give me your money. But in all seriousness, I directed them inside with the professionalism of a Tony Award winning theater's usher (which I am! Cool right?).

Anna got all fancy for her lovely hula-hooping-while-drinking-and-pouring-wine act:

Later in the visit we got to go to a Cirque Roots fire rehearsal. They were fire dancing and hooping and the lighting was so interesting! I made some sketches there too, though it is hard to sketch figures in motion, but I did get some photos in case I ever need a reference. 

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!

Sticking it to the Man

I have finally completed a project I have been working on for a couple of months now. It all started when a certain photo studio corporation for which I used to work promised me and the rest of my co-workers commission for our largest sales during the Christmas season on top of our hourly wages. Just an extra incentive to sell more stuff. We worked our butts off off only to be denied our commission thanks to a loophole that corporate conveniently set up for themselves. My co-workers and I were incredibly angry and disappointed.

To make myself feel better about the whole situation and get some risk free, completely legal revenge, I hatched a plan. You see, this photo studio chain offers online coupons all the time. One of these coupons is a free portrait collage (an 8x10 print with multiple photos in it, comes in a variety of formats. $30 value. No purchase necessary. Limit one per day per family). Can you tell I have sold these before?

It is essentially a bait and switch. You get people in the door who think they don't have to spend any money, take awesome photos of their kids, then they say, "Awwwe, well these pictures are so cute I'll just have to get a couple sheets!" Ta DA! We now have your money. BUT you actually can just get the free thing and walk away. In fact, you could theoretically go in every day and get one. Without spending anything. This is really, really annoying for the photographers whose job performance evaluations are based on how much they sell, but for the customers, this is pretty great.

I had calculated that I would have had at least $200 worth of commission coming my way had corporate not gone back on their agreement, so I decided to get about $200 worth of free collages. I would fill the collages with pictures of me doing ridiculous things in ridiculous costumes. When I talked about this with friends, they generally wanted in on the action, so some collages have other people doing ridiculous things in ridiculous costumes with me.

I have completed my goal. I feel pretty vindicated. Here is the end result:

Please note the bottom middle photo in which Becca is strangling me. Priceless.

The obligatory Harry Potter theme photoshoot. 

Yup I walked to the mall in a cape. I am a true Earlham kid.

Western theme, with a fence obviously.

50s house wives!

Pajama party!

...So I feel like I got my revenge and everything I did was completely legal! ...Except posting pictures of the collages online. Technically I can't reproduce these images because I don't own the copyrights. However, if this company tracks down this blog and calls me out on it, I will be really surprised. I imagine they have better things to do, like finding more ways to suck money out of both their customers and their employees.

Hooray!

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.