Experiment: Photography

Here are some of my favorite pictures I've taken from the last year. Some were taken in Oval Beach, Michigan, and other in Chicago, Illinois. I sort of forgot I took them. I really need to organize my photos better.

Funding the Experiments

I worry a lot about money. A lot. I currently live at home with my mom, so my biggest expenses are gas, art supplies, and food. But, since I go to school full time, I don't have a lot of time to spare to work at my part-time job, so what little money I do earn goes to those expenses. My undergraduate experience is beginning its wind-up, too; I'm almost done with my fourth year with only one more to go. Soon enough, I'm going to have to pay back loans, pay rent on an apartment, pay for insurance... so yeah, I worry about money a lot.

In my professional practices class (the initial reason for this blog), everyone has been posting on the class discussion board about various topics we might be interested in, such as internships, networking info, and non-profit organizations. In the section called "Finding Money: Scholarships, Grants, etc", I found this link posted.

http://www.foxtaxservice.com/taxinfo.html

Tax info for artists? I don't think I need it now, but guaranteed, I will need it all too soon. I have only been filing my own taxes for a few years (several of which a family member took care of them), so I know nothing about taxes. This link taught me some useful things.

1. As a small-business artist, I can deduct losses from my taxes as long as I can prove I am, or am attempting to be, a for-profit business. To prove this, being organized is essential.
2. I will need to choose a business entity type. Is my business a Sole Proprietorship? A Partnership? A Corporation? The type I choose will affect how my taxes are filed.
3. I might as well think about retirement now. Here's an interesting blurb: "If you are 25 years old and put away just $10 per week till retirement, earning an average 7% return on your investment, you will have $132,663.36 by age 67. If you start five years earlier, you would have $191,187.39. The extra $2600 saved turns into $58,524." Can I afford to wait to think about retirement??

Experiment: Screen-printing (Part III)

The final product of my project:

A series of four prints of the rising, waxing moon. I like how they turned out, which can't always be said for my projects. I usually end up hating them. Maybe I'm more easily tapping into things I really want to create. Or maybe it's because I finished in a timely manner and didn't have to rush around like a crazy person. Tough call.

Lab Exercise: Making a Notebook

I hope I'm not generalizing, but every artist I know, including myself, is obsessed with sketchbooks and notebooks. We love to buy them and fill them up with our ideas, thoughts, and inspirations. But I am often poor and cannot justify spending $20 or more on yet another notebook (especially since I am notoriously bad for never finishing them), no matter how pretty it is. So why not make your own? It's much cheaper, and very satisfying to use. I've made several, and I get many compliments on them, or at the very least a surprised, "Where did you get that?" There are many ways of putting your own notebook together. Today I will show you a hardcover notebook. Also, I maintain that my way may not be the very best way of doing things, so if you have a better idea for a step, feel free to try it. This is just what works for me.

Your essential ingredients list: decorative cover paper, cardboard, plain paper (I use regular computer paper), scissors or Exacto knife, ruler, glue, something to spread glue with, some fabric, two full soup cans (bear with me), a pencil, two thin stiff items, clips to hold the stiff items together

Optional ingredients: decorative inside paper, bone folder

Experiment: Screen-printing (Part II)

Here's the sketch of the goddess figure to be featured in my screen-print. I was afraid to just start drawing blindly on my screen without really planning out which part you would see for each phase of the moon, how exactly it would look, all that. For drawing her on the screen, I used blue drawing fluid, which is a positive drawing technique (as opposed to crayons or stencils, which are negative and block the ink). I actually like how she turned out: a bit wilder and perhaps more primitive than the sketch.

Printing was wonderful this time around, full of happy accidents as opposed to being a comedy of errors like last time. I'm not finished with the prints (I have eight in progress), they still need one more drop of ink. If you look at the sketches in part I, you'll see it's the graphic black layer, which will also be created on the screen with blue drawing fluid.

One of the happy accidents: you can see the whole figure through the dark grey layer. I'm ok with that. I think it will work out well. Look at all my prints!

Fueling the Experiments (Part II)

Another one of my influences, this time an American Comic: Elfquest by Wendy and Richard Pini. I discovered Elfquest at a week-long summer church camp years ago. I only knew one girl in my cabin, who was from the same church as me, so I was nervous. When I walked in, it seemed all the other girls knew each other, and they were reading Elfquest. They happily introduced me to the series, and it was a wonderful fun week. And I am still reading Elfquest.

I love that this series brings up a rather original concept of elves. They are short, proportionally the size of children. The main tribe lives in the forest, as traditional, but there are other tribes who live in the desert, in the snowy mountains, and it is implied that all elves originally came from space. The comic deals with nature, which I am all for, and I love the characters' designs and personalities. There's not much about this comic I don't like. Elfquest hasn't really influenced me yet, but  as I delve deeper into the comic world, it surely will.

Elfquest is actually available to read for free online at the official website.

Experiment: Screen-printing

Screen-printing is a very interesting process. Before this year, the only printmaking I had done was relief (woodblock), which I loved. While similar, relief and screen-printing are different enough that I am excited to explore them further. For example, in relief, the bulk of your time is spent on carving your wood to create what is basically a stamp. Then you ink up, zip zip, and you're printing. For screen-printing, the physical act of printing takes the longest. This is because you usually do many layers. You're able to have much more flexibility with your prints, changing up the colors and design on the fly. Relief prints are often a single color, and doing multiple colors on the same print is difficult (maybe that's just me, being inexperienced in it). Screen-prints are almost expected to be at least three colors and are often many more.

Here's my sketch for my next screen-print. (I may or may not post pictures relating to my first group of prints. It was, shall we say, a learning experience.)

The first print was also of the sky, so I wanted to continue with that. I'm fascinated with the sky, even attempting to do a daily sky-photographing a while back (didn't end up panning out). The moon has always been an aspect of the sky I love. So this print will be the moon on a grey (probably not that shade) background, with black markings around the edges. Yes, they will be graphic and choppy as I have sketched them. There will be four variations, with the moon rising across the sky and growing from crescent to full. To mimic the markings on the real moon, there will be a faint picture of a goddess-like figure behind everything else. As the moon travels across the prints, it will reveal a little bit more of the figure, as I attempted to depict in the top-right corner.

The edges of the print will not be straight, flat edges. They will be jagged, rough, to correspond with the graphic mark-making of the black. The effect was achieved on the screen by using a pressure washer to take out the red block-out around the edges from a pre-existing composition. I'm excited to see if they will work as well as I imagine they will.

Moon goddess, eh? I guess Sailor Moon will never really stop influencing me.  (Although, in my defense, I liked the moon before I got into Sailor Moon, so there.)