Newspaper Taxis

MAD

There is a great exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design called “Second Lives” which is artwork that are “objects and installations comprised of ordinary and everyday manufactured articles, most originally made for another functional purpose.” So they take some ordinary things like spools of thread, eyeglasses, old vinyls, and make new artwork from them. It is definitely worth the trip to Columbus circle to see this and the newly redesigned building. The permanent collection of the museum was less impressive to me. A bunch of jewelry stuff and a few interesting fiber pieces and pottery. Still its definitely worth the trip especially if you go on Thursday nights, which is pay what you want night. The “Second Lives” exhibit runs through April 18. Also worth a visit is their website which was, along with the rest of their new identity designed by Pentagram. The website itself isn’t great, but you can browse through the museums entire collection online which is pretty cool.

Alexander Calder at the Whitney

I went to the Alexander Calder exhibit at the Whitney Museum today. I showed up with general respect for Calder, but I never really gave him much thought before. The exhibit was very cool and I left really impressed. The coolest thing and majority of the show was his wire sculptures that he did. There were lots of those that varied in scale from a foot tall to 6 or 7 feet tall and with a variety or subjects: nudes, portraits, animals, and caricatures. My favorite things were the portraits, there were about 20 or so of them all on the wall when you come in. He captured the forms with just a few lines. Pictures of them really don’t capture how amazing they really are. I wish that I could buy a replica of one to put in my apartment. The exhibit runs through February 15 and is definitely worth the trip.

Alexander Calder: The Paris Years 1926-1933

Bison Woman

So I was asked by my friend Kalene if I would make a print for a print show she is doing for her gallery. I decided to take my figure drawings from a couple of weeks ago as inspiration for the new print. So I took one of my sketches and cleaned it up in Illustrator and thought it would be better to have an animal head instead of a human one. Then of course the surf board just followed after that. Alternate animals thrown about was giraffe, frog and dolphin. I think I will use giraffe for the follow up Giraffe Man. The show will be at Open Space in Beacon, NY from December 13-February 1. Details will be here shortly.

Figure Drawing

Sal and I went to a figure drawing session at the Society of Illustrators tonight. It was the first time I have drawn in a couple of years and I have to say it felt really good. Sometimes my brain can get stale working on the computer all of the time and doing something as hands on as drawing on paper can really ignite things. This was a fancy session that has models and live jazz musicians. Tonight was a piano player and bongo player. They did a lot of nice stuff including a few riffs off of Beatles songs and it adds a very sophisticated touch. Now I want to start going every week. Starting up again felt a lot better than I thought it would. I seemed to get in the flow pretty early and didn’t struggle as much as I was expecting. One bad thing though, is I was hoping to get my design tonight for my screen print I have to do for the upcoming Open Space gallery show. No such luck, but I do have some ideas now that I am trying to work out more in my head.

re*

Starla and I were to get involved with Kalene, Dan and Easton of Thundercut and Open Space to design a Tote Bag for a benefit show promoting using reusable canvas bags instead of disposable plastic ones. I decided to do a typographic version of the reduce/reuse/recycle using re* ( prefix used with the meaning “again” or “again and again” to indicate repetition.) I’m excited to see what everyone else does.

Makin with the screen screen

Well I didn’t get as far as I would have liked on my new poster but I’m still in good shape to have it done by next weekend. This one is a lot bigger than my previous one (15″x20″) and as it got larger the complexities went up as well. I got a great deal on some bigger screens at Standard Screen on Friday so that was nice. Once I got the screens, I coated them with the emulsion Friday night. So far, so good. First obsticle was printing my transparencies for each screen, and with the size I am working at meant printing four 8.5×11 sheets then trimming and tiling them together. I managed to get the five color design onto three screens, so that meant 12 sheets total.

After I got the positive transparencies done I need to expose the screens to light. Now since this poster is so much bigger than my past one it was very difficult to make sure all the edges and corners of the screen got as much light as the middle. It took a few tries and three ruined screens but I eventually got them all burned right. The text layer was the most difficult by far though since there is so much coverage plus a lot of intricate little shapes from the smaller letters and counter forms.

Now that I have the screens done I need to worry about the actual printing of the piece. I’m sure the size of it will be a hurdle again here and will have some learning to do. I also am going to be playing with a new technique, transparent inks.

All good though, all good.

Beatly Goodness

So in spite of American Idols butchering a lot of their music this week, I have been working on my new Beatles posters that I hope to have ready for printing this weekend. Next weekend is Beatle-fest in New Jersey and I would like to have a few posters to enter into an art contest so hopefully I can get some people interested in buying some. As it is now it is a bit more complex than I would like at this stage of my printing career, but I guess the designer side of me is winning. Here I will need to make 5 different screens and figure out some transparent ink stuff as well. I guess there is no way to learn better than just jump in there head first. We’ll see.

More Prints

I have been doing more test with my printing and learning the ins and outs of the process as well as playing with different color combinations. i got some tips from a friend who does screen printing so next weekend i will make some changes and keep going…

First Prints

So I took my knowledge I obtained in my class and tried to put it into practical use in creating one of my posters. I chose my Stones poster which I felt it would be a good starting point. Things turned out pretty well although I ran across some problems with getting the ink on the paper without the paper buckling under it. I need to figure out which paper will hold the ink the best. The whole screen burning process turned out better than I had hoped, it was decently simple and just took a couple missteps before I got it right. I will continue to do some experimenting until I get this down though.

Print Me A River

Today was my screen printing class at the Etsy labs in Brooklyn. The class was great and I can’t wait to start experimenting more with the process and with different materials. They taught us how to set up our own screen printing in our little nyc apartments and everything, so cool. I came up with the design as last minute as I could midnight the night before the class. Not really sure what it is, but thought it would look cool on a shirt. The process was easier than I had imagined it being, we made the screens, I did some test prints on paper, then went on to fabric. Now that I know how to do it I want to work on transferring one of my posters to screens and work on some large prints! woohoo exciting.