The struggle may (or may not) be over

So there it is, the text printed, the leaves printed. I'm not sure that I'm so happy about it. It took me three ink mixes before I found the right color for the darker color of the leaves. I wanted the colors to move, ie, to not be so perfectly registered, so that the leaves looked like they were quaking in the wind. I don't think I like the result though.

So I made 2 more screens today, to give the leaves a bit more definition, and after printing up a few more, I decided I liked that even less. So here I am, leaving well enough alone, for now. See this entry for where it was before I added the text and the darker color of the leaves.

Now I'm back to finish prepping my 7x7 boards.

Weeding, matting, & mounting

Weeding first...

So this is the part of the yard that I was working on yesterday and continued to work on today. Where there are paving 'stones' now were covered in weeds and 1 dead daphne. A couple of the pavers (concrete chunks) and the manhole cover were already in place, but the rest were added yesterday. Where the Japanese anemone (the pale pink almost white flowers) is now was where the dead daphne was. That poor daphne was moved 3 times before it finally decided it had had enough.



And seen from the other side:



And here's my stash of concrete chunks and rocks, ready for me to use at a moment's notice. But of course this pile has sat there unchanged for the last 2 years. I think I'll at least move them over onto the dirt so I can clean up the driveway. Tomorrow. Notice how so many things are 'tomorrow?'



Then spent over 8 hours cutting mats, matting & mounting prints, writing up labels for the print series, packaging things up. And also made more changes to the web site. Little changes, a little bit here and there as I think of them.

Oh hey, I got to try my credit card gizmo today. The neighbor bought a Portland Open Studios tour guide, and I took the payment with the debit card.

Experimental gocco print, day 6

But first, some garden pictures. This last winter, the 3 Doug Firs towering over our house dropped some huge branches on the roof and broke the skylights. I removed the branches but just dumped them in the backyard and never dealt with them. So today, I dealt with them. Here's the big pile, along with some tall weeds; you can hardly see the fig tree the weeds are so tall:



The branches are gone! All cut up and in the yard debris can. Weeds are gone. And you can sort of see the fig tree. It's got lots of figs, but I'm not sure that they'll ripen before it gets too cold:



More treasures that I scored from a neighbor. He had taken out a couple of trees and left these root stumps by his yard. So we hauled them back last week. The neighbor kept on warning me how heavy they were, and wasn't even sure that Mike and I together could move them. Well, guess what!? I could move them by myself! They're definitely not very heavy. Right now I'm thinking 1) a birdbath, or 2) some kind of a critter/barbie fort. I'm leaning towards the critter/barbie fort, a One Million Years BC in the backyard:



More weeding and pruning, and this path is now visible! I hadn't been able to walk this way all year:



Back in the studio. I inked up the horse again and printed over the existing horse, this time in black. But I printed very lightly and quickly. This is a before and after shot; the top had just been printed with the black layer, and the bottom hadn't yet been printed (both of these are rejects though):



And a finished print:



Spent the rest of the afternoon going through old rejected prints and cutting them up to make little booklets of sample gocco prints from them. Using the coil binder, of course! The rejects from this horse print (as yet untitled) will be sample fodder as well.

Experimental gocco print, day 5

Spent a couple of hours in the afternoon working on the mock-up of the print, trying to figure out what it was about it that I didn't quite like. Took me a while, but I finally figured out the the horse's body needs to be lighter.

So here I've just put down a layer of white. This is still using the same open screen that I've been using all along, with the horse shape cut out of a self adhesive label.



Then I decided it needed to be just a touch whiter, so I hit it again, only this time very quickly and lightly. So this image has "one and half presses" of the white:



Here's the cut out of the horse shape. Cut with an exacto knife.



Then I finally had to flash a whole new screen to print the horse itself! This is the first screen I've had to flash in all these different layers that I've printed. I didn't want it to be black (I thought it would be too stark), but looking at this now, I think it looks rather washed out. So I may need to go back and print black (or at least very dark brown) on top of it. But I'll let it sit for a couple of days first. Both because I want to think about it, and also because I MUST return to work on the flowers web site starting from tomorrow.



So here are about half of the prints drying on the drying rack.



This print has been a complete experiment, and there were lots of mistakes and gotchas, which hopefully I won't make again, at least not too many more times...hah! I think I might get 8 good prints (if even that many) out of the 22 I printed. Of course, if I print another black or dark brown layer over the horse, there might be further reduction in the number of good prints left. We'll see.

Tomorrow, silk road flowers again!

Experimental gocco print, day 1

With this print, I'm refining some of the techniques I first tried with Fatherland, and also trying some new techniques.

First shot: This was a used screen -- the yellow screen from the Dentistry print (a cmyk print). You can see the screen is still stained from the process yellow, but the screen is clean. I used white paper tape to block out an area 3+" x 7" and inked up with a custom mixed yellow and some of the pastel yellow straight out of the tube. And in this case, I put the ink on rather thinly because I wanted the unpredictable drop outs. This is just an under layer.



The resulting print:



Getting ready to print the next layer. This screen was also a used screen, but it's a completely open screen, ie, I flashed it with a solid black copy. I used this for many of the background shapes in Fatherland; you can still sort of see the shapes. Here I've blocked out the borders:



I just drew circles with the ink out of the tube; this is one of the techniques I've been meaning to try. Here's the screen in the gocco:



Then I cleaned it up. And in this case, since the screen is completely open, I do use Windex to clean it (no worries about pin holes), so it's completely degreased and ready to be used again. Then I used white paper tape to block out another area, and drew ovals with the ink out of the tube, in orange:



This last shot was something that I hadn't tried before, and in fact, just thought of as I was doing this -- I smeared ink on the screen with a rubber spatula. The ink is very thin, and I could only print 5-6 prints before I had to re-ink it. But here's one print:



Tomorrow, I will layer over the left side where the magenta, orange, and red areas are. These are just there to create the texture for the under layer. At least that's the idea. We'll see how it works tomorrow.

Bought a coil binding machine on ebay today. The project I'm proposing to do with the kids at the Q Center involves them each printing a page and then the class making a coil bound book from all the printed pages. Plus I can use it too, of course.