To Grandma,

alright so these are all the blocks I just printed this afternoon shown with a good example of the prints I made from them.

valentine’s day Gunnels I intend on coloring. they will be pretty glorious, not that they aren’t already

the rose was originally a study but I liked it and I think I still do.  it’s pretty basic but it’s easy to get bogged down trying to work small and I have to keep it iconic to make it work.

next after that is a trillium. same deal different flower.

after that, queen of pomegranates. her face looks like it was mde by De Kooning and the idea was kind of stupid so these are probably going to become mixed media. but the dog turned out rather well so I’m happy.

after that is slugs posed in a classic crowned ouroboros. which I happen to love, fits very well into my general theme of taking classic mythological and alchemical symbolism and making it out of things native and familiar to me.

ta- fucking dah.

my little kitchen studio set up. I roll out slabs on that pane of glass, and I use acrylic ink for the easy clean up and relative non-toxicity (hard to be unsafe with a boring color like a carbon black I have to say) anyways, I have a small speedball roller and am using dickblick’s black acrylic relief printmaking ink. works pretty good.

second picture is a table covered in some of the prints I made today. So Many Prints! I should list them on my etsy after the show goes down considering I think I may have a few left over. my main intention with these smaller prints is to make a thing at a lower price point so I can entice people to buy them and support me, even if they can’t afford the larger prints, some of which I am going to price higher than others. (the complicated ones) I am not doing a closed edition on these (so I can always make more) and I might hand-color some of them.

acrylic ink is water soluble though, so we’ll see how well that does.

That is my tool box.

on the sides it has two little slips of paper one says “you are a good person” the other says “you are a fucking tool” the bottom has one of my prints that says “FUCK” printed on brown paper.

inside is: a strop, my speedball carving tool, a couple of X-acto knives, what’s left of the fancy carving set  I bought when I realized I was going to be doing this for my BFA (note to the world: never loan out your tools, even if you think not loaning out your tools makes you look like an asshole, nobody notices your name carved in the handles and they will not give them back) other things: my engraving twist which is unsurprisingly nice for working up scratch board, my scratch board tool, a lump of eraser, some utility knife blades, some mechanical pencils, some mechanical pencil lead, an eraser and an Altoids Small’s tin where I keep my tool-bits. (I like to think of it as the Altoid’s sharps tin) the box interior is also decorated with a couple of these silly librarian-themed temporary tattoos.

I felt like showing some progress pictures today of something simple. I’m trying to get back into the swing of making things and what better opportunity for that than a three day weekend?

I am making several more of these simple herbaceous prints to be ready for my show at Dandelion Botanicals in April. it always pays to have a range of prices available, somebody who won’t drop $200 on a piece might still want something for $20.

thelittletree asked: Just wanted to say, I think your prints are beautiful!

Thank You!

Talking With Her Was Deeply Refreshing.

linoblock print, 18 by 24, black and white, same as the rest of them.

so, this was one of my fall quarter prints, it’s kind of an apology for the other mermaid prints I had made by then. I wanted to make something sweet and pretty and I wanted to put some serious care into the little foreground details and I think I succeeded at that, the background runs into trouble mostly because I needed more practice at clouds and mountains and oceans.

this print is also an effort to make sure my series unambiguously passed the Bechdel Test, but they’re probably talking about boys.

the madrona tree above them and the blooming waxy-leaved strawberries underneath are both plants that exist around here shown in their appropriate environment of an ocean cliffside and that’s part of what I’m trying to do with my mythological things. I want to take the typically euro-centric mythos of my upbringing and make it local, make it personal. I could incorporate, and I have considered incorporating, more of the native PNW imagery but I don’t want to be disrespectful so mostly I hold off on it.

now I say mostly, because these are carvings, they are monochromatic and I do take some inspiration from the traditional formline styles of native bent-wood boxes. I am however, just using that as a way to think about composing and balancing my monochromatic compositions, not as a way to think about making shapes nor yet as a stylistic decision. I can’t say I’m not apeing the content of native art though, because I am talking about a personal/shamanic mythos, and I am mostly depicting animals and part-animals. but both of those things are common world wide, so I don’t worry about it.

DeerGirl herself recalls both the Grecian images of diana as lady of the hunt, and a feminized image of the horned Sorcerer in the cave of Les Trois Feres. other than that I bet you could find more than a dozen different interpretations of a girl wearing antlers on Tumblr alone. and things go in and out of popularity but images of my mermaids are always popular.

go figure, ideas are weird like that.

this is one of my prints that I consider to be on the unsettling and weird side of my output.(as opposed to nostalgic and cute which is my other axis)  all I’m going to say about the content is she’s not actually asleep (note the one perked ear) and all of my symbolism is always puns.

you’ll note that I’m not giving you lot a title to gnaw on either with this one. I hate titles. it’s an image. supposed to be enigmatic. and if I spoon fed you all everything with words all the time you’d think you understood what I meant to say. bask in ignorance! that’s what I wish to say with this one. antler-chronology applies of course if you wish to puzzle out where it goes.

anyways, I make art out of things I wish to obsess over. I need to grind out my feelings and slash my fingers with my #4 and get embarrassed over everything every once in a while to feel like I’m making authentic art. basically, I need to throw my heart onto the wall. sometimes I need to feel judged both for my art and for my life. I need to confess and to over-share.

the part of me that produces the deer girl images, rather than my old anthro drawings I used to do is about exploring that deer-girl side vs the old were-kate side. my usual way to react to feeling unsafe and unsure is to snarl and lash out be fierce and shouty and I’m learning how to do the other things. to ask for help, be vulnerable, and be open.

I like making art that makes me personally get emotional about it. something that can remind me of how I was feeling. to hammer an emotion or a moment into a block, that is an intensely meaningful thing to me. even if, and ideally if, it conveys nothing to a viewer.

this has always been the case.

Crow, 9” by 24 linoleum block print.

This is the the last of the long animal prints I made and while I deeply enjoy the format because it looks so banner-ey and nice the problem is, that because this is a deeply non-standard size it would be prohibitively expense to frame it. such is life.

I re-made this print again after the first run and cut out the veins on the grape leaves to add more variance in line width and texture. I dunno if this helped or hindered the image particularly as the delicate textures being the main point of interest got a little overwhelmed, but not too excessively.

hard to tell sometimes.

I do feel that I should have put more details into the bird. maybe in future I can do something interesting with that.

this is also the most obvious of my Hogwarts related symbols. another thing that amuses me greatly

Screen Prints!

alright these are the three screen prints I did for Ben Moreau’s summer screen printing class that he liked so much he said it was better than a visit to the dentist for a root canal.

and what else could possibly be better than dentistry?

alright, these are a bit of a departure from my other stuff. I was just not feeling it during the summer after I made it into the BFA program when it comes to sticking to my “theme” and making art that would be useful for my BFA portfolio in the coming year. it was my first summer in Bellingham, I was mostly crippled all the hell, and sick of being pretentious and sad. So, I made OZ Fanart.

the first one is a reductive screen print of myself as Glinda the Good Witch of the South in her costume as she appears in the first OZ movie. it glitters. it is hard to convey just how much these things glitter in the sunlight like fairy-taffy made of pink and shimmer but they do. I would have to convert it into one of those glitter .gifs to give you an approximation of how nice they look.

this print was made with reductive screenprinting, which I have a pretty hard time controlling because I am like, comprised of 90% sloppy mess. I still love it.

the second one is of Christine as Ozma the rightful Queen of OZ. I was mostly trying out all different kids of techniques with this one, the swirls of the sky, the layers, the bajillion million layers and colors and the fact that it could still use a pattern on her dress. the gold bits also glitter.

this print was made through transparency processes, both using clear plastic and ink/paint/cutouts to expose the screens, and gobs and gobs of transparent base to give the inks character and clarity. (note her head flowers over the building)

third one: A Tribute For The Wizard.

photographic processes and fucking up repeatedly by not saving my progress lead to the end result you see here, this is Ben as the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz being displeased by our offering of One Good Print.

as he said in crit “YOU MUST HAVE AT LEAST FIVE PERFECT PRINTS!!”

everybody in class except for the Asian kid we never really saw posed for this.

first silhouette is Jake, then Brendan, then me holding aloft the golden print, then Allison and Stacey.

this class was good times.

curlywurlysarah asked: How are you so good at Lino printing? I'm trying to self teach myself!!!!

Short answer: Thank you so much! I really like making all of my art and I’ve had a lot of practice.

Long answer: I went to school and spent roughly 6 years doing nothing but learning how to skillfully make art, how to know the world how it really is, and how to have big cohesive thoughts and opinions about anything given enough time to write it all out. College! I recommend it.

I spent a lot of 2010 to 2012 working on the pieces you see here on my tumblr and if they were organized chronologically, you’d see how much I improve from one project to the next due to the feedback I received from my friends and teachers both in critique and informally when I asked for help.

Printmaking is very process oriented, if you want to get better at the process: you should try taking a class or at least watching a demo at an art supply store, that way you can see somebody do it live and ask them questions as they go along. Ideally you’d get to use a press too, I may be stuck using a spoon to print with now, but nothing beats a press for making it easy to print big.

But, if you think you’ve got a handle on the process (hint, warm up your linoleum a bit and it will become easier to carve) the rest of it is just practice, and figuring out what you want to make and how you want it to look, before you try and do it, without getting bored because you over-thought the idea, or paralyzed by fear that the finished product won’t be as good as it already is in your head.

The trick to that is also practice.

The other thing that allows me to create interesting art is that I had to find my center to know what I wanted to talk about in my art. I think everybody goes through this, you’ve got the tools, you know the procedure, now what? what do you want to draw?

Finding your center, your genius-sprit, your idea-particle detector, your muse, your omnivorous all devouring cultural trash compactor, or whatever you call the place where the ideas come from, is important, but everybody already has it, you just have to practice using it.

If you don’t have it yet, or don’t think you do, write out a list of things you’d like to draw normally, things you’re interested in learning more about, your areas of expertise (be they archeology or pop-culture hair styles) things you wish you’d made, things you know you could make better than the original, the things (or people) you obsess over.  What is the best of your life? The worst of it? What can you not stop thinking about?

The things that itch at me, the stuff I absolutely have to shout from the mountaintops, are the things I make art about. Sometimes if I don’t think I have anything I go chase ideas. I drink scotch with friends and talk, or stay up late until my feet feel too comfy and the birds are chirping at the sunrise, or I stare at the computer screen at my job and have a pang of angst and I keep a sketch book and I draw any and every little thought that comes into my head.

And then I do my best to take the little fluttering light of an idea and manifest it right. Sometimes I manage it, other times I don’t do as well as I’d hoped. But there is always next time.

Oh, and also.

If you don’t manage to print square on the paper, either make a jig to hold everything in the right place, mount it right  when you frame it. or use enough paper so that you can cut it square after the fact.

Somebody somewhere will love everything you do.  If you have something genuine to say it’ll speak to somebody. No matter if you don’t think it’s good enough or not. There’s no such thing as perfection, there is only hard work and being true to yourself and your idea.

Thanks again for the compliment, it means a lot to me.

 Happy New Years and good luck to you.

Heard It Through The Grape Vine.

this is the reason why I use grapevines to talk about gossip and drama. this song, right here. but yet, it’s so smooth and so funky. another good song to draw naked people too (except that some of them have the dancing feet)