Experiment: Oil Painting

I haven't posted a lot of my actual thesis work. That's because I've been mostly focusing on oil painting, and since I've technically only taken one class on the subject, much of what I've done this year I'm calling "learning experiences". I would rather not show these learning experiences to the public. For example, last quarter, I made a painting that was 4ft x 1.5ft. I decided to try my hand at stretching my own canvas. So I looked up instructions online (you can really find just about everything online!), bought a roll of unprimed canvas, gesso, and some pre-made wooden stretchers (the bars that make up the "frame" of the canvas).

4ft was about the tallest stretchers the store sold, and they only had two, so I had to buy both of  them. One of them was severely warped. But I made do; I tried to unwarp it with wet paper towels and heavy books. This seemed to be working, but it drifted back into place after I had assembled the canvas and had begun painting. So I was stuck with a warped painting that simply would not lat flat on the wall. I had to hang it in a thesis gallery show, and it was embarrassing. I did not take any photos of it.

Fortunately, I got instructions on how to build my canvases completely from scratch, stretchers and all. This quarter, I decided to go for broke and make four all at once.

The stretchers, made from 1x3s and quarter-round molding:

 Triangle corner pieces:

Here's where those triangles go:

Ready to nail together:

 The final product:
 

Only three of the four frames ended up useable; one of my long stretches ended up at least half an inch too short somehow, and though I tried to wrangle things into place, it was just a sad mess. I will get more supplies and make a new fourth frame sometime soon.

Daily Skies (Part V)

Daily Skies (Part IV)

The only problem with being so obsessed in taking photos of the sky is that my current digital camera is too bulky and unreliable to keep with me at all times. That leaves me with one other option: my phone's camera. It takes ok pictures, and I can pull it out reasonably quickly when I'm driving (which is when most of my photo opportunities happen), but it's not good enough. It can't capture the nuances of color my own eyes see. Plus there are often interesting cloud formations right on the horizon, and they look big to me, but on the phone's display, they are quite small. It's difficult and annoying when my phone simply can't capture what I want it to. A good, portable digital camera is an investment I need to make, and soon.

Case in point, this last image. The way I could see the sky through my own eyes, there was lots of the pink dusting on the underside of the clouds. But in the image my camera took, there is very little. It bugs me. This is an example of both the color limitations and the automatic zoom out/wider angle business I mentioned.

Experiment: Screen-printing (Part VII)

In winter quarter, as well as taking film photography, I took another round of advanced printmaking with the phenomenal Noel Anderson. As is evidenced by my FYASO Friday segments, I love the FYASO meme. It's been burning in my brain to recreate it in art somehow, and so I decided to go with it for printmaking. I thought screen-printing would be most useful and effective. I like the idea of using a handmade process that can be messy, time consuming, and potentially one-of-a-kind to create a physical version of an internet meme. Thi sis because, in contrast, internet memes are quick and spontaneous, created to fit the situation or mood, meat to be more throwaway images. You don't need any editting software to make them; the more popular memes have websites where you can quickly throw words on the image (for example, at memegenerator.net).

First, I tried to replicate the FYASO image with original words.

Then I loosened up and put layers together more haphazardly, letting them fall as they would, to show more of the frustrated feel the Owl often has.

In the second half of the quarter, I worked on images of a sunset. I used many transparent layers of ink to achieve the floating layered clouds. This piece of a good lesson in embracing mistakes and not letting them frustrate me, which is a problem I often have.

Here is a close-up of some of the clouds. I used silver ink in some of the layers.

FYASO Friday

Daily Skies (Part III)

There's a really nifty tool in Adobe Photoshop called Photomerge. In Photoshop (at least in the CS3 version), it can be found in File > Automate > Photomerge. You can choose multiple files to load into the program, and Photoshop will automatically combine them into one large image. I consider myself to be reasonably tech-savvy, but I don't know how Photomerge works. It seems like magic to me.

One day recently, I took a bunch of photos of a colorful, interesting sky, slightly overlapping, for the sole purpose of using Photomerge to create a panoramic view. And here is the end result.

Daily Skies (Part II)