Sunday, December 12, 2010

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Friday, December 3, 2010

Landfills


In the past couple of weeks I have become extremely intrigued with landfills. So I decided to create my final project about landfills. My main objective was what a landfill would look like if you cut it in half. How the different layers of trash and dirt would be presented. These two images below show my process. I bought some styrofoam at a craft store. I sectioned it off and cut into it with different tools. to create a dirt like crevice. Then I painted it different shades of brown. All the tiny trash in between the layers are cut up trash that I either rolled or crumbed up. I used hot glue to stabilize it. I am still in the process of creating a transparent layer to go over the top of the box.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Photographic work

My teacher caught me off guard the other day when he asked me to talk about some of my photography work. I didn't really know what to say because I don't really follow a theme. So i decided to post some images of recent and current work.
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Final Multiplication and Oil Glazing (2/3)

Some images that I made for the multiplication assignment. It was about experimenting with printing. I took paper that already had paint on it and ran and image across the paper with the printer. Using digital ground I was able to paint in areas that I liked then reprint either the same or different image on top. Here are some of my examples and final pieces.


Acrylic and oil glazing


I am currently trying to choose which box I should use for my final project which is to build a 3 dimensional object.


Oil Glaze I have been working on and off throughout the semester

Printing on a silkscreen image

Pig print and acrylic glaze

Multiple prints (the pig is in there) acrylic glazing

Thursday, October 28, 2010

More Printing

Advanced painting 2 Coltan painitng
applying digital ground to large scale papers for printing. I think i am preferring the clear to the white digital ground.
Papers getting ready for printing

 Pig scan

1st ever silk screening attempt.. wow i wish i could take that class

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Printing on Prepaired paper

Our next assignment is to experiment with printing on anything but white paper. I took out some of my traded papers, and tried to find surfaces that would be ideal for printing. I used clear digital ground on the original surface before I began. Then i went to the photo lab and ran some trail and errors with the paper profiles. Below is my 1st image. 



 

Working on my final stratification projects ... i began to sew into the paper (which was really fun)

finished piece

more sewing

I feel like i have been working on this image forever! but i think I am finally happy with it.. I cant sew into it because of the paper thickness



stratification final

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Seed Packets Research



 Flowers go with us in every major event in life through birth, marriage, holidays, graduations, illness, and finally death. Flowers have been grown in decorative gardens and used as adornment for centuries on virtually every continent on earth. Where do most of these flowers start? Seed packets. I personally found seed packets an interesting object because of their surface. In particular a few of the seed packets that I used in the project were a gift given by someone very important to me. The seed packets that I have depicted represent the personification of plants to humans primary referring to me and my significant other. The most predominate packet is the sunflower which was a gift from my boyfriend. We initially were going to plant the seeds in my back yard at my rented house. However, the fear of planting them and then having to move over whelmed us, the seeds were never planted. So what would they become?? more garbage? I decided to use the expired seed packets for my mixed media class. The real concept behind this piece is just being ready for a commitment. Committing yourself to take care or something as small as a plant, to your relationship, or even yourself. Selfless beautifying the earth. My teacher mentioned something about important characters contributing to the piece. He brought up Johnny Appleseed, which I think could be a great reference for what I really should of done with the seeds. After painting, gluing, cutting, and pasting I began to sew into my flower packets. The sewing comes from the term "sowing crops" which means dropping seeds through a tube.  The implement would cut small channels into the soil and the seed would be dropped into the channel.  Before this time seeds were usually planted by a method known as broadcasting.   Broadcasting is simply throwing seeds onto the ground.  The seed drill had many advantages to the broadcasting system.  First a much higher percentage of seed came to produce crops.  Less seeds were lost to birds or other animals.  Finally, with rows, it was much easier for the farmer to weed his crop. This process was conveyed with the actual sewing I incorporated into my piece.


Flower symbolism began with many ancient religions. Many flowers were originally linked to ancient deities including Venus, Diana, Jupiter and Apollo. During the Renaissance, nature was viewed as a reflection of the divine.
Historically seed packets depict many varieties and colors of flowers and vegetables that are considered extinct today . Horticulturists and researchers are now using antique seed packets for referencing the extinct varieties as they may only be seen as images in these packets (which are or course vintage seed packets and not the packets that I am using).
Below I found a interesting process of how vintage seed packets were made and I copied it on to my blog. I thought it was really interesting stratifying process that fit well with the project.



Stone Lithography - How the Seed Packets were Made

When one looks at any of the seed packets up close, they reveal that the flower or vegetable image is made up of tiny dots. The foreground, the background, the flower or vegetable itself, everywhere. The dots are representative of the technique by which the artist drew the original image. It is a DRAWING not a painting. The technique was called STIPPLING. Stippling was created by using a pen with a needle point, drawing only one of those dots at a time, a random dot drawing. It was very labor intensive to say the least. The canvas that was used to drawn on, was a slab of polished Limestone. The Limestone was about 4 inches thick and polished like glass. The artist wore a magnifying glass visor and drew the dots one dot at a time, with only one color at a time. A separate stone had to be used for each color. To increase production speed, no one artist did the entire drawing themselves. Many artists were involved making to a finished packet. A different artist was assigned to each color. It turns out this is how silk screening was invented, evolving from the stone technique. A separate stone for each color - a separate silk screen for each color. Before 1920 this is how it was done. After 1920 they were moving on to the CAMERA.


STEP 1: One color of a particular image is drawn, dot by dot on one stone. The packets color range is as few as five and as many as 20 different colors. 4 color process had not been invented yet. That meant as many as 20 different stones were used in an assembly line to obtain only one packet. The ink that was used had a waxy-greasy base. That made it water repellent. Grease repels water. Grease attracts Grease

STEP 2: The entire stone is flushed with water. The water is repelled by the greasy drawing, but makes the rest of the surface of the stone damp.

STEP 3: Now the color (the ink) is applied to the stone using a roller. When the ink is rolled over the stone, the ink sticks where the grease drawing is, but not where the stone is damp with the water. Remember, grease attract grease and grease repels water or in this case water repels grease. The inks came from Germany. There were called COAL-TAR. To this day artists and printers consider them the best there ever was. Coal-tar inks were primarily known for two things: Intensity and most importantly, the colors did not fade over time.

STEP 4: Next, the blank paper, uncut and unfolded, is set on the stone and even pressure is applied to the entire surface with an un-inked roller.

STEP 5: Finally the paper is "peeled" off the stone and the inked part of the image transfers from the stone to the paper.

One color is completed. That was only the first stone. Then they moved to stone #2 and so forth until all the colors were done. Remember there could be as many as 20 different stones. Each step required what is called "Perfect Registration" or alignment on the stone. In other words, the unfolded packet paper is placed in exactly the right position on the next stone. Positioning is determined by small marks on the stone that look like plus signs (+) and little circles (o). There were the same little plus signs and circles on the unfolded packet paper. When the two plus signs and circles were perfectly lined up to each other they made a pass. One of the most interesting items of all, is that the combination of the technique, colors and the dot process created a 3-Dimensional image. It takes a magnifying glass large enough to accommodate both eyes to see.

Facts about seed packets- A short story that I found on the internet

Traditional flower gardening started in the 1860's in Philadelphia, when as a ten year old boy started breeding chickens and other birds. At age 14, he was a published author in the top poultry trade journals of that time. By seventeen, he was selling high quality poultry through a successful mail-order business from his parents home. His business grew and he sold other high quality animals as well as poultry. In 1878, when he was 20 years old, he decided to offer his customers high quality food for their animals. He began to offer high quality seeds for sale. By 1881, vegetable and flower seeds dominated most of his sales, and by the turn of the century seeds were in, and poultry had been out for a long time. The rest is history. Burpee's seed catalogs, often more than 150 pages, was one of the most popular pieces of reading material of the day. The catalogs contained items not expected in a gardening catalog. It was loaded with stories of Burpee's travels around the world in search of new and exotic produce and flowers. Always guaranteed to be chock full of garden advice was a given every issue. In 1915, when Washington Atlee Burpee died , his family tried to have the American Marigold declared the country's national flower. It was then Illinois Senator Dirksen who submitted the bill to Congress and fought to have it considered. Needless to say the attempt failed. America did not have a national flower until 1986, when President Reagan signed legislation proclaiming the "Rose". 




Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Faculty Show Preparations


 Collaborating with 20 plus students and our professor for the faculty show. We compiled a random assortment of objects, images, textures, shapes and anything else we could get our hands on. The class worked in small groups and as a whole. My small group collaged 1950's magazine images, music sheets, and maps. In the end we came up with a bacon Hitler Man. However, sadly most of the stuff we  made that day never got on to the final piece. We were each given a frame and were allowed to create something that was ours to include. I painted my frame red and decided to create a stage like structure within the frame, red because the main colors in my image were warm and because when I think of stages most of the curtains are red. I used a collage for my main image. The subject matter was mason jars and human features (more personifying unreal things) the curtains were made of torn out phone book pages. I wanted to create a reverse fish bowl effect, meaning instead of the viewer staring into the object, the object stares back. I also personified the mason jars to give a whimsical surrealist look. The phone book pages present the random selection on people. I used black thread to tie the image and the frame together giving mason jars a puppet feeling. Then I applied acrylic and oil glazing on top to make the colors have a brighter appearance. Below are photos of my process
The image that i started with was a traded surface and I cut out most of the images from a Victoria secret magazine and a home and garden magazine (yes they were my moms mags)

the back of the frame after bunching up phone book pages I used staples in the back so I would have something to tie the needles to.

threading the thread

image before acrylic paint applied

hanging in the gallery- potential to move
the finished piece


Here are the frame that were primed with kilz and then a neutral color was applied
In the gallery entire piece ( insert about 15 more frames as soon as others bring them in)



Friday, October 1, 2010

Saturday, September 25, 2010

More Stratification

 Above- The papers that I received from paper trading- and the alternative process that I used before I stratified them.
Seed packet series- In progress ....

Scanogram that I made last semester, with oil glazing. The yellow ballerina is my mother in 1957 when she was 8 in her dance class, this was a old sepia photo that i colorized and restored. I photographed a checker board for the backdrop.   I photoshopped in the bottom half of the picture with an image that i made of chairs in the ECU auditorium. I took pictures of my bathroom curtains to make the stage curtains. Everything else were magazine clippings that I scanned. This image is intriguing to me because of my mothers presence in a whimsical world, it almost brought a new era to an old image with the modern surroundings. I am still in process of oil glazing.



More oil glazing on some seed packets I printed from internet

To the far right was an image my teacher gave me. To the far left is one of the traded surfaces. The middle images are the combined result. 

A funny cyanotype of MEE!

In the studio adding to the papers I selected from the trade off.


Working with salt, chalk pastels, phone books and more

YAh!


Seed Packets- Still in progress

Photoshopped print out of my combined surfaces-In progress