I have been spending the past couple months trying to find a niche. I think I have found it. I have started work on a series of paintings based around the shadows that leaves and tree branches cast. In these paintings I am exploring negative shape and color relationships. Also, I will be beginning work on some quilted wall-hangings in the near future.

All kinds of ideas are bouncing around in my head right now. The hard part now is to pin them down, execute them, and then shove them out into the world!

Please stay tuned for pictures and reports of my progress. Now that I have a fairly good idea of what I want to be doing creatively I will be posting a lot more often. Off I go!

Well it's been quite a while since I posted last. What can I say, it's been a busy summer!

What follows is the final stage of my senior art project. It took me about nine months to put this series together. Each piece is a collage of prints, pencil drawings, and colored paper on top of a thin piece of wood. I was quite proud of them. However, during the summer I stored them incorrectly and in the heat and humidity bad things happened to them. I try not to think about it. But here they are, immortalized in digital image.

Salmon/Asiatic Dayflower

Sea Turtle/Jack-In-The-Pulpit

Stingray/Morning Glory

Manatee/Trout Lily

Humpback Whale/Trumpet Creeper

Next up, paintings that I did during my first painting class last semester. Please forgive the horrible picture quality. You can't really fit a painting onto a scanner.

A portrait of my dad. I'm rather proud of this one.

An abstraction of bones. I really enjoy bold shapes and flat colors.

An abstracted close-up of a chandler and price letterpress. The assignment for this painting was to do a painting that was the opposite of what you usually do, so I did mechanical shapes and warm colors.

An abstracted view of the mountains that surround my school.

This is my first editioned book form. I made five editions of it. I made a woodcut of the moon and used that as the background for each page. The words were made with a letterpress. I wanted to make a book about the ups and downs I go through during an entire year due to my seasonal depression. On the top of each page is the month and the Native American name of the full moon for that month. The smaller text are the thoughts and feelings that I have during that month. This was the project that made me fall in love with the letterpress.

Now a few self-portraits. During my level two relief printmaking class I decided to explore self-portraits. It was a new thing for me because I had not really done any self-portraits in any medium up until then.

This is my favorite self-portrait that I did during that class, and probably my favorite that I've ever done. It's a very unique-looking print. I used chine colle to get the streaks of color.

This is a self-portrait that is a facsimile of a print done by relief printmaker extraordinaire Antonio Fransconi. The original print had the likeness of Edgar Allen Poe in the background instead of my face.

This one is actually a monotype and not a relief print. A monotype is a type of printmaking where you can only make one of the print, i.e. you can't edition it like you could with a relief, intaglio, or lithograph. The ink is put onto a plastic plate and you can add or subtract ink to the plate to create your image; It's very much like painting or drawing. Once you have your image then you print the plate and what you drew on the plate is now on the paper! After printing the plate though most of the ink is gone on it disappears and you can't print it again. Hence the term monotype.

This post is to show you the process often gone through when creating a intaglio plate from a sketch. First, you make your drawing:

Then you draw the main lines of the sketch into the plate, not worrying about any of the shading. This is the first stage of the print inked and printed:

Once you have the main lines of the main lines how you want them, you can then go into the shading part. This particular print is a drypoint which means I did not etch the image into the print using acid, I simply scratched the image into the plate by hand using a scribe and a roulette tool. This is the second and final stage of the print inked and printed:
And this is the finished product! I call it "Ivy".

Next up, two prints I did during my itaglio printmaking class.

My bromeliad. I printed this one in green and black. I like the black print better, but it seems I only scanned the green print.

A funny looking vase that I found. I am a big fan of cross-hatching.

Some prints from my first relief printmaking class. This is the class that made me fall in love with printmaking.

nasturtium. I used chine colle

to get the orange circle

ferns- a multi-block print

"shoji" my fish that swims in the air. One of my favorite prints that I've done so far. This was a reduction print.

I thought I would start out with some old drawings of mine that I happen to have scanned and saved on my computer. I enjoy drawing plants the most. I just love the shapes that I can find within the leaves and negative space created.

self portrait

oriental bittersweet

pepperomia

pepperomia