Vacation in Printmaking Land

This summer I'm enjoying the pleasures of home and good visitors instead of travelling.  One week of my vacation was spent in a school board course on printmaking.  I've done the course before, and students are allowed to use it as a workshop, pursuing their own projects with help as needed.  I skipped the etching component and spent more time on silkscreen and linocut.  Here are the results.

Vintage ties, round 2.  A previous year in this same course I made a few ties with CHIVALRY and geek on them.  I wanted to do more and after some fb input and debate, I settled on debonair, fierce, and a new version of geek as the words.

I love the use of text in visual arts and wanted to try something along those lines.  For inspiration I went to the book of poetry penned by my best friend Alison Calder, and sure enough found something very special.  The poem is called This is History and I love it.  I borrowed and altered and collaged together images of a rabbit face and wolf with the poem.  I was worried the text would be too small to silkscreen but it turned out really well and both Alison and I are thrilled with the final piece. :)

Fans of Fancybutch (if any exist) will recall that in the October craftorama I made stencilled hankies with butch symboles.  I wanted to make a set of these on silkscreen for various applications.  The fourth symbol changed from pi to a baseball cap.  My own tshirts with this set in silver ink make me giddy with boi glee.

My silkscreen turtle printed well on fabric and not as sharply on paper.  I plan to try again with different inks to see if that helps.  In the meantime, one four year old is getting a cool new green tshirt.

The biggest surprise this time around was my newfound love of the linocut.  I started with a little 'solidarity' piece.  Didn't realize til I was cutting how much I had bitten off with the lettering details.  Thankfully I did remember they had to be backwards.  The result reminds me of vintage political posters, and that is a good thing in my books.  Definitely going up in the office.

Realizing I had time for another project I got this idea of three panels with the urban animals of Toronto, each in giant size against the skyline.  What was I thinking?  The planning, drawing, and cutting of the three panels was a lot of work, but really good experience cutting for me.  And the result, well, see for yourself.  Worth it.  And inspires me to do more linocut.

So there's a slice of how I spent my summer vacation.