I made two versions of this project, both as my final for my painting 2 and printmaking 1 class respectively. Both projects were relatively open-ended, but I gave myself the challenge of making something more technically challenging than all my previous projects in the class, as well as aiming to create something that felt larger than life.  

The first step for the painting project was research and thumbnail sketches. During my research I was really drawn to the colors of many iridescent beetles. As I was super into Egypt as a kid, I quickly got the idea to tie that together with scarabs and sun imagery. During my sketches I was careful to get the shapes of the insect correct and did a lot of experimenting with copic markers to get the rainbow iridescence just as I wanted. 

Once that was done, I went pretty much right into starting the final acrylic painting. I was careful to measure everything with a ruler and tape to get the sun's rays and symmetrical shapes looking just right. I painted the rainbow colors underneath first, almost like an underpainting, before going over it with dark green, gold, and finally white highlights.  

In printmaking, I had the idea for remaking this project pretty much since the very beginning of the semester, especially once I realized there was shiny gold printing ink we could use - and first sketched it out during planning for our second project of the semester: but due to the limitations set by each project, I felt I wouldn’t have been able to pull off the result I wanted until we were given complete freedom for our final. 

My first step for this one was taking my old sketch from earlier into the semester and transferring it over to Procreate so I could turn it into a screenprint. I knew I wanted this piece to be larger than my other pieces, but I wanted there to be more focus on the wings for this version, so I made the canvas super wide – 13.5 inches – while keeping it relatively short.  

One challenge I faced when designing the piece was figuring out how to get a rainbow of colors while keeping the number of layers low – as I didn’t want to run out of time to print it. My solution was to make my yellow layer partly transparent, as yellow already isn’t a particular opaque color to print and by combining it with transparent ink I can use that to my advantage to get light green and orange from the other colors below it. By doing this I still had 7 separate layers, and got each printed in black on acetate sheets so I could transfer them to my silk screen once I completed the drawing.  

For each layer, I had to mix my inks, enter the burn room to coat my silk screen with photo emulsion, burn the design into the emulsion and wash it off, set up my printing station to print all 30 pieces, dehaze my screen to reset it, and repeat. This whole process took about 3 hours for each layer if everything went smoothly. Fortunately my only big issues were with aligning each layer, and many of my prints coming out hazy on my yellow and gold layers. At the end I had about 5 prints out of 30 that came out perfect. 

If I were to do anything different about either of these projects, I would have found a better gold paint to use and would have spent more time on the wings in the painting, and taken more precautions to ensure proper alignment in the print. But overall, I am very proud of the final product.  

I really loved creating both of these projects and would love to turn this into a proper series by challenging myself to recreate this in more different mediums in the future.