Grand Opening!
Well, we’re finally gonna open our doors officially, and we’re starting off with a great art show Saturday night.
Faultline Grand Opening
May 12th 6-10pm
Park in the lot at 815 High Street, Oakland CA
FaultlineArtSpace.com
Faultline on Facebook
I did a few drawings yesterday to use for screen printing. For this one, I used a different sheet of tracing paper for each color or layer. 3 of the drawings are charcoal, which gives a nice texture for the refractive quality of butterfly wings, and the other is ink. I registered each drawing with pins, and this allowed me to photograph them so the drawing is in the same place, and made lining up the images in Photoshop a snap. Also these drawings are about 11 x 15 inches or so, I shrink them in Photoshop, it’s just too difficult to draw them small, which is a common trick in many industries.
Original drawings for butterfly screen prints
Tiled butterflies ready for the inkjet.
I then tiled the finished butterflies into a PS Document, with each color being a separate layer. To print, I will open the document and turn on one layer, print it, turn that layer off, and turn on another, print, and do that until I have my four colors digitally printed on transparencies. Each transparency then is used to make a stencil on a screen, so I’ll have 4 screens, one for each color. Since I’m printing on black paper, I’ll have to print the white and bright red a few times to get the colors to really pop. For this registration has to be absolutely perfect, and is always a bit of a gamble, just bumping the screen slightly can ruin everything.
This is what my palette looks like these days
I’ve had a nice little break from my big butterfly collage but I’m ready to get back to it. I just finished a big oil painting commission so now I can move on, or back, rather. Currently this piece is about 1350 butterflies, printed by hand and cut out with scissors. Some of the butterflies are 11 colors, and all are at least 3, which is the yellow and black one, and actually I printed 2 layers of white and then two layers of yellow to get the color to pop, in addition to the 2 other colors.
Screen printed butterflies on paper
I’m going to finish this one for Faultline‘s Grand Opening Saturday May 12. It feels pretty awesome to being so close to finishing it, I’ve been working on it for close to 8 years and I’d like to start the next one, which will be 20,000 butterflies. I’ll be giving myself 2 years to finish that one. It’s going to be quite large, 12 x 17 feet or so.
Screen ptint for Laurel Art Works Political Show
I have a few prints hanging up for the Political Art Show Saturday April 14th, 2-5 pm at Laurel Art Works at 4148 MacArthur Boulevard (near High st.) in Oakland. There is also a popup “free for all” element of the show, so bring some stuff down to sell and show if you are so inclined. Here is Laurel Art Works Facebook Page
Life drawing anyone?
I’m pretty excited to finally get this room up and running. It is a community space where we will have some life drawing sessions and other group drawing events. The light is the best in the whole studio here, so we built a room around it. In art school I had a class where we had giant skylights and we would draw the models with the natural light until it got too dark to see. It was such a contrast to every single other drawing class I took, where they black out the room and use weird spot lights, which almost always look awkward. It’s very peaceful to sit and draw for a few hours and pay extra attention to light changing around you, which is one of my favorite things about painting landscapes. For me, drawing the figure in a setting like this with natural light helps me channel some of my experience with landscapes into the drawing.
Here’s a quote from the above mentioned instructor, Raoul Middleman, and a link to the audio mp3 from public radio. He is talking about the life of natural light versus dead artificial light.
If your out doing a landscape, or even in the studio… there is kind of this emotional pulse, some sort of organic life to the light itself that I like to get into the painting somehow, so I’m not ossified into some sort of vinegar based preservative, but rather there is a chance of a sudden swelling of light, a sudden loss, that makes it difficult , doesn’t hold still…. it substantiates the fiction and makes it more truth bearing to me.
