"Tiger"

This project was an introductory practice for students who were in their first printmaking class. This print was one of nine prints that when put together made a picture of a tiger in water. The medium was woodcut relief print. I decided to go a little further with it and bring out the wood grain by wearing down on the surface with a metal brush.

Close-up of the "Tiger" woodcut relief print.  

"Shifting Terrain" 

 

This photo and the two after it were part of an intaglio project where the goal was to create an original design, and then by using different etching processes, turn it into a different composition in the end. So for this print, I used certain textures in the copper like leaves for the ground and aluminum foil as a kind of rockscape in the background. I then used different sugar lift and ground etches to make the landscape shift into a fiery chaos.

"Shifting Terrain" - second phase 

 

In this print, you can see that things are beginning to change. There more blotchiness in the background and the shadows and darks are being brought out more. 

 

The color difference is not from the lighting conditions of the photo, but from a different type of print paper I decided to use for this phase. 

"Shifting Terrain" - third phase

 

For the final transition, I painted on more contrasting etches over the tops of the trees. I also used a Dremel to smooth out the creek ripples in the middle of the composition. 

"In Oil, We Trust" 

 

As a student at Louisiana State University, every one seemed to be concerned about the Deep Horizon rig explosion and oil spill and its impact on the Louisiana environment. Our teacher decided we should try and express this in the form of a lithography print. 

 

I took my main influence for this print off of the Louisiana state flag, which portrays a pelican ripping open its own breast in order to feed its children. Instead of having the normal pelican, I took one of the famous images of the pelicans drenched in oil and used it as the centerpiece in the composiiton. Around the pelican is a BP symbol; however, with this project only being black and white, it does not stand out as strong as it should. On the bottom of the print, I made it seem like the pelican is dripping oil over an outline of Louisiana with the number 153 inside of it to signify the number of days the Deep Horizon oil well was not capped.  

"Take Five" 

 

I receive a lot of influence for my prints from music. In one of my projects where I we received free design, I decided to accompish an abstract, cloudy, but colorful design for one of my favorite musicians: Dave Brubeck. The medium for this project is several layers of digital lithography plates - a process where anegative image is placed over a light sensitive film on a sheet of alumnium. Once exposed, the film reacts the same way a lithography stone would and can be inked up as so. 

 

For the overall design, I decided to go with an abstract organization of colors that are overlaid through the digital lithography process. over those are printed several other layers of digital lithography in multiple color layers. 

"3D Ladybug" 

 

This print was laborious, but I was overal satisfied with the outcome. I was going through a phase when I was really interested in 3D videos and filming techniques, like stereoscopic 3D process that uses red and blue lenses to transfer one image to one particular eye. I decided to try my hand at it and make a stereoscopic print. In order to create such an image, you must have two images that are taken side by side but that still have the same central focal point. I took these pictures in Kentucky when I was visiting family, then I used Adobe Photoshop to layer and color the images. I then transfered those images onto lithographic plates. Once the images had been printed from the plates in cyan and red, I screen printed a black layer over to make the image complete. 

 

"Maps" 

 

This is another example of a musical compostion; however, I made one giant mistake in this print. I made this print based off the song "Maps" by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I was so familiar with the song that I thought I had the lyrics correct when I printed it. Wrong. The words should really be "Wait. They don't love you like I love you." Even though I screwed up the lyrics, I was really happy with this print. 

I screen printed a base layer in white ink with a little bit of gloss to it, and then I screen printed each layer over that base. Each color, except for the blue green formation on the side, was its own separate screen layer so overall I was screen printing ten layers per print. Below the words, I took an image of The Yeah Yeah Yeah's lead singer Karen O performing live and printed it in a shifting grayscale. 

"Violins in Abstract" 

 

This was the first project I completed in multi-layer, multi-color lithography. I started out with a base design of the violins with some brush strokes and other texture layers applied, and with the different layers I printed, I added a little more texturing and strokes. 

 

I decided to have some exra fun with this print though. After the prints had dried, I painted laundry detergent over the violins to create the f-holes and strings. In normal light, you cannot see the laundry detergent. Once a black ight is turned on, the painted features stand out along with the bright colors. 

"Winter" 

 

As part of moving on with different genres and favorite musicians, I decided to go in the direction of classical music with Vivaldi's "Winter" from The Four Seasons Suite.

 

This print was a little rushed due to the tight time constraints we had enforced on our projects beacuse of tropical storms and hurricane scares. For this piece, I created a snow flake design that I screen printed on the pentagonal pattern I had printed on the paper from an inkjet printer. After I completed this, I created the dark trees in woodcut relief and printed over the snowflake pattern.  

"Yppah - Eighty One" 

 

*No, I did not print this wrong. The band's name is actually Yppah (happy backwards). 

 

I was in a summer digital printmaking class, and with free reign over what to do, I decided to re-imagine an album cover for Yppah's newest album "Eighty One". In reading about the album, frontman and creator of the band Joe Corrales Jr. said he recieved inspiration for many of the songs from his new experiences in surfing. I looked at the songs with that point of view, and transferred it into a blend of pattern, pastel and beach inspired sun designs, and an intaglio wave print. The red and blue pattern was created through the process of digital intaglio, which in some ways is similar to digital lithography except its more time consuming and delicate. ONce I had those two layers printed, I screen printed the three sun layers so each one was correctly overlayed with the one behind. Finally, I used some hard ground etcching processes to create splash and wave forms to make the half-pipe wave coming in on the right.  

 

"White Swan" 

 

Out of all of my prints, this design and the one below were the most laborious and time consuming. After seeing the amazing film "Black Swan"  by Darren Aronofsky, I was inspired by the beautiful cinematography of the film that showed the character's breakdown in a chaotic array of mind scrambling shots.

I went through the movie and picked out the image above and image below from certain frozen frames of scenes. Once I had that image, I transfered the positive of the image into screen print. I then took the screen print layer and printed it onto an 18x24" copper plate, and the screen layer reacted as a ground for the acid etching. After I etched the plate, I used a Dremel tool to create some brushed metal texture around and above the character. Once I had the copper plate completely printed, I printed a woodcut relief layer in silver ink over the intaglio layers to give the print a shiny gloss. 

"Black Swan"

 

Even though this is the latter part to the image above, I was not able to print it the same. The image I used was of the black swan dance that is one of the climaxes of the film; however, the image had such open areas that when it was etched, it was opened up so deep that it was unable to securely hold ink. I still have the copper plate and would like to see if I can print a transparent layer onto the image to make it stand out more. 

 

I followed the same process with this image. It was a screen print image printed onto a copper plate then etched. Once etched I printed it in a mixture of colors like metallic silver, grey and white. Due to the etching, the image did not show up very well even before I printed the woodcut relief over it. Even though you can barely make out the figure, I do feel the woodcut gave a dark texture to the black swan figure.