Carried Away

Seems I got carried away with my own work and such, since I have not posted in over a week. As always I am working hard on my thesis work and dealing with the stresses of graduate school. At this point I have gotten almost up to the present with my work, there is just one more semester to add. In my forth semester, I took only 6 credits worth of classes, the two were Digital Printmaking and Screen printing. Not a ton came out of the semester, work-wise, but I did begin to form my ideas for my thesis. I also began to explore digital printmaking and the digital translation of imagery. Below are some of the prints I produced that semester, not all because many I have discarded, but those I keep will be shown. There are two laser-cut relief prints and two screen prints. I have some other screen prints I need to photograph, but they are collaborations with my whole class, so not very specific in imagery or idea just graphic creations.
Now, quickly laser-cut relief printing is a new form of relief imagery. By creating an image in grayscale format in Photoshop, the artist can inverse the values, and flip the image. Then the file can be sent through a laser-cutter and the system will translate the image in a halftone pattern. Tiny dots will be burned into the piece of wood, and the value differences are created by the space between each of the holes. Where the image should be pure white, the cutter will cut it completely out, black will be left alone, and grays are created determinant of their value. This creates a photo realistic image in a woodblock printed form, but you have to have a piece of wood larger than your image to use the outer strips as runners because the halftone fills in easily with too much ink. Imagine, in the end, a wood block that is rolled up like a lithography, with thick, but thin amounts of ink.

"Up From the Canyon" Laser-cut Relief

"Up From the Canyon" (detail)

"Cowboy" Laser-cut Relief

"Desert Lighthouse" Screen print

"Phoenix, AZ" Screen Print