Tuesday, April 21, 2015

My Professional Practices class is having an exhibit, XVIII Collective Individuals. There are eighteen people in the class and each work is to address the theme "eighteen." My contribution is a book (I hope) of etchings, eighteen pages, with images of small toys and objects, increasing through the book from one to eighteen. The toys are meant to be like little talismans; to me the book is a visual meditation on the passing of childhood. The ledger theme is present also; for me it stands for assessment and assigning values. This paper is not intended for printmaking and is giving me a lot of problems, to the point where I'm running out of paper. I may have to do some of the prints on a different paper, and print the ledger pattern afterwards. (I scanned it just in case.)

Tuesday, April 7, 2015


I've been experimenting with book forms that can be printed all on one sheet, and then cut and folded to make the separate pages. This is a Snake Book, so called because the pages follow an "S" path on the page, like a curving snake. This picture shows the sheet laid out flat, but once it is cut and folded up the pages all face one direction in the correct reading order. I decided to use a related subject matter, a poem about a snake by Emily Dickinson. The illustrations are a comic strip style, since it was fast and easy to do, and goes along with the "childhood innocence" theme of the poem. The illustrations on the covers (front cover shown above) are scanned from an old field guide. The book fully opened is on a sheet 14.5" x 9.5", which folds up to 4" x 3.25" once the covers are applied to the first and last page. This is a small edition, printed from an aluminum plate lithograph.