Dogwood day

Sketches

1/6 - Some new sketches that in the fall, will become giant fuckin' sexpot color bombs.🍆🌮

Silkscreening

8" x 10" silkscreen edition of 6, available here.

8" x 10" silkscreen edition of 6, available here.

It's been more than 30 years since I did any silk screening myself. Our high school was just phasing out technical trade classes in the late 80's and we had an amazing "graphics" industrial-style classroom (letterpress, silkscreen, offset printing) with no teachers (they all retired) so it was kinda of Lord of the Flies in there. I sort of learned from other students but not really - mostly just made Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane's Addiction t-shirts to sell in the parking lot of concerts. I'm hoping to start making small editions in my studio and making them available for cheap, in my store this fall/winter. Click for more like this.

Lilly Mugshot

I love to obsess over [drawn] lines. How it's not just a 'line' but how each side has a surface and that there's a variable difference between those to surfaces - they have a relationship to each other. I went to grad school for printmaking but really I only wanted to learn more about drawing. I wanted to know stuff that I never understood, like when, where and why to make lines thicker and thinner. I'm still learning about it and not unlike skateboarding - learning a new trick opens more doors to learning more tricks - more tools to keep in my toolbox. I still love looking through my toolbox and thinking about what to use on a drawing and maybe (hopefully?) know why to use that tool. But often it's just me taking a tool from the toolbox and using it because it seems fun and seeing what happens and inevitably learning something cool from it. Click for more like these.

small, Medium, LARGE

"Begonia Baloney" 2017, 52" x 70" pen & ink and watercolor on paper

"Begonia Baloney" 2017, 52" x 70" pen & ink and watercolor on paper

  1. buy flowers from place down the street
  2. draw flowers in sketchbook
  3. Do it some more
  4. draw larger version on 22" x 30" paper and watercolor it
  5. unroll a 80" x 55" sheet of watercolor paper from a roll
  6. staple it to the wall and soak it with water
  7. let it dry so it stretches out and will now lie flat
  8. sketch flowers on the huge sheet of paper in pencil
  9. draw over pencil lines in ink
  10. erase pencil lines
  11. draw thicker ink lines over previously inked lines
  12. watercolor once ink is nice and dry
  13. wonder why I just spent so much time and money doing that
  14. remind myself that it's way cool looking
  15. sell for a shit-ton of dollars
  16. wake up from lovely dream about selling art (see 15)
  17. repeat

more like this...

Sketchbook activity

True story: we found an old reel to reel tape recorder in the basement of a log cabin in the Catskills this week. It was lying on a table next to a human skin-bound copy of the Necronomicon but the power was out and we can't read whatever that weird blood-ink language was written in. Probably for the best.

The Log Cabin

The Log Cabin

Back to Nature

Looking back two sketchbooks ago I found some pleasingly beautiful botanical and seascape studies. I'm interested in seeing what they would look like scaled up (22" x 30" and 50" x 30") and drawn with pen & ink and intense watercolor.

[secret band] poster progress

The whole word measures about 21" across but will be shrunk down to 15" or 16" as a silkscreen print.

The whole word measures about 21" across but will be shrunk down to 15" or 16" as a silkscreen print.

Drawing varying line widths is the most satisfying part of the inking process. If I don't exercise patience when applying 3, 4, 5 layers of ink I inevitably smear wet ink spots with my wrist.

Drawing varying line widths is the most satisfying part of the inking process. If I don't exercise patience when applying 3, 4, 5 layers of ink I inevitably smear wet ink spots with my wrist.

A portion of the drawing for a Primus silkscreened (edition of 200) show poster for the summer.

A portion of the drawing for a Primus silkscreened (edition of 200) show poster for the summer.

I rejected this first round because proportions were off (a painful exercise because this took a couple of [wasted] hours to draw). I especially didn't like how high the letters reached into what will eventually be the middle of the poster. It looks…

I rejected this first round because proportions were off (a painful exercise because this took a couple of [wasted] hours to draw). I especially didn't like how high the letters reached into what will eventually be the middle of the poster. It looks weirdly blocky because I always draw these with straight lines to get relative measurements correct before curving the, uh, curvy parts.