update?
guess I should since two sets are being made/designed right now for CT folks.
Wow, it’s been almost a year. Strange year too.
JhJs print ongoing
Printed the peacock blue layer and the orange/red layer after that.
The overlay and transparency looks awesome.
process yellow will be next to get the nice bright green on the Js side of the print. And then a metallic gold layer for some details and the black layer for linework and this puppy will be done done steak.
New design pending at Threadless – Lost Marbles
Came from playing marble slide with the kids.
Always wanted the pieces to do more than what they were capable of doing.
Imagination always beats reality, doesn’t it?
Sketched it for screenprinting class, made an edition of 24 prints using two different color versions. Will be printing the gold and black screens tomorrow in studio.
Wanted to see how it would look on a bigger canvas. Also the white paper background really bothered me, so being able to expand the background options was a plus.
Here’s hoping 1. it gets approved, 2. it gets high votes.
I’ll update with a link when it’s up for voting.
Grandpa’s coins
I just went through a shower cap full of coins from my maternal grandfather.
Sorted within the cap were individual clear plastic bags tied off with coins from different countries within.
I haven’t spent much time researching what’s in there, but grandpa liked interesting coins from many countries, I think.
The one interesting batch that caught my eye: four twenty cent Queen Victoria coins from Hong Kong, circa 1868 through 1895.
A 142 year old coin on my desk.
Reading about that coin in particular was interesting. England shipped their coins over to Hong Kong for use.
My grandfather was born on Mainland China, moved down to Hong Kong to raise his family. WW II had a significant impact on family history, and I don’t know all the stories. I just know he moved around a lot in his lifetime. Grandpa lived in HK, Taipei, and finally Birmingham, England. I guess the coins went with him to England.
A very long drawn out circle.
And now they’re on my desk in Haddonfield, NJ. If anything, they’re not on the right land mass.
Check out the scan at flickr.
In another bag: Nine 20 cent silver coins from Kwang Tung Province with Dr. Sun Yat Sen on the face. Dated 18th year. (1929). I was confused by why there were only coins from that year in the bag as his other bags had coins from different years. And then I remembered that in Cantonese, the number ’18′ sounds phonetically like the phrase ‘will definitely prosper’. Talk about good luck charms, I got 9 of them!
These days it looks like they may be worth $10-15 depending on condition, but the fact that grandpa went looking for a particular year is priceless, and these aren’t going anywhere.
Just signed up for a screenprinting class
Took a class in screenprinting a decade ago when I was up at Museum School in Boston… Did not pay attention at all and was turned off by the amount of manual labor – printing, cleaning, etc. etc. Which is funny because all the other classes in printmaking like lithography, etching, woodcut had a ton of manual labor. Man, those limestone slabs for lithography!!! And grinding those faces clean for the next print?! Now I wish I paid more attention in screenprinting class.
Doesn’t matter now, refresher course. Screenprinting seems to be the one area where I can make prints for the least amount of $$ outlay. All the other printing areas need at the very least a press. Screenprinting will just need manual labor. Which is free.
Wednesdays at night. Hope this leads somewhere.
At the very least it will force my Threadless subs to be simpler as I should be thinking in terms of screens, # of colors, line vs. field. etc.
Simpler in my head = more of a chance to print. A slight majority of prints in the Tless catalogue seem to be 2-3 colors only. And I like big prints, so less the better cause 5 colors is max for oversized subs.
New Inlay design in the works
Hope to flesh it out this week.
Looks to be really interesting.
And that MSCE thing, jeez, it took only 4 days to fall off that wagon.
Ink Addiction at Threadless
It’s subbed
-
and approved
. Here’s to the new decade.
EDIT: I am very proud of my score, and I was even up on the top 25 scoring subs for 2 weeks. Now I gotta wait 90 long days to see if it will happen (print) or not. I’ve been reading up more about screenprinting and all that goes into it just to make my brain wrap around the method behind the madness so that the next few subs will have some organization around it in terms of colors, backgrounds, visibility and detail. I have been thinking in terms of colors and contrasts recently, but not enough in terms of simplicity and editing down my tendencies for overused colors.
I still cannot for the life of me get down to 4 colors. It just doesn’t work in my head. Have to try it though, just to see if I can do it.
