Careful Now!

I love that I decided I had to spend my time looking up Father Ted memes to go with my project, it just seemed so right! I can blame my years of addiction to the programme as the cause to my complete misunderstanding of the Catholic religion...nothing to do with the fact I decided it was cult years ago ;)

After some mishaps with paper for printing, I finally managed to get my woodcut edition printed with time to spare.  As I was doing what's known as a reduction cut, I had to print my lightest colour i.e. yellow before carving away more from my wood block.

Once this yellow layer was printed, I cut away what I wanted to keep yellow before printing a red colour over the existing yellow prints.

Before applying the last colour, black, I had to make sure that the red and yellow were completely dry.  So this gave me time to cut away everything that I wanted to keep red.  I then applied the black ink and tried my hardest to make sure the registration was as accurate as possible.

I was really happy with how my finished wood cut came out.  The registration of the black is a bit off in some but the effect they give is actually really cool.  It gives this almost 3D, dazzling effect...as if the pope is moving within the frame.

Sad to be finished woodblock as its an area of printmaking I really enjoy.  I really want to work on a bigger scale with this so hopefully I'll eventually get the chance to do this later on.

For now, I'm moving on to Silk Screen printing this week which I'm not the biggest fan of.  But on the upside, I have a vague idea of what I want my image for this part of the project to be.  Keeping with the theme of religion so plenty more blasphemy images to come!

Drawing Project :P

So on Fridays we have Drawing Class and were set a project about a month ago to have done for tomorrow...needless to say everyone left it to the last minute per usual :P

For the first part of this project, we had to pick both a contemporary artist and a dead one.  Once we had our choices made, we then had to study their works; take note of the types of markings they used; the materials; what they drew on etc.  Once thoroughly studied, we then had to create a drawing in their style.  Sounds fairly straight forward but drawing in someone elses style is not easy!

For my dead artist I chose Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.  I hadnt been that familiar with his work before this but on studying him for this, he has fast become one of my favourites.  His style is very different to mine, I do very literal art whereas with his he suggests more than literally saying something.

So with that, I practised his style before making my own creation.

I then took the subject matter of loneliness and homelessness from my first project to help with the composition of my finished piece.

I did the same with my contemporary artist.  i chose Fiona Banner for this as i was aware of her as a sculptor but not so much with drawing.  Fiona sees language as an art form and therefore worked a lot with words.

Again i did sketchbook work before creating my own image.

Fiona would write out every details of films on walls for her work so i decided to look at a life as a film and write out details of that.  Taking 4 events from my life that stand out for me, i covered a studio wall with it.

The final part of the project was to draw our interpretation of the word "blue"....art people are gas arent they :P

So i took it as an emotion and drew my own interpretation of the word blue.

Twould really take it outta your fingers like...

So still playing with my Pope (scuse the choice of language) and its really starting to go well I think.

In my last post I was picking my composition for the actual woodblock.  The evil Pope got twisted and changed over the weekend till I was left with these two compositions.

The first image is purely just my evil pope with the word "PREY" overhead.  This is just a little play on words, it can mean several things.  When you hear the word, you think of worship, church etc.  But on seeing it, thoughts of preying on people for money or preying on children as the case may be, also spring to mind.

The second image is based on the idea of a King, Queen or Jack playing card.  It has 2 sides, in this case evil and good.

But I thought that the first showed my idea better so thats the one I went with.

The image had to be then transferred on to a woodblock.  Using tracing paper (which we were very excited to find that they actually now stocked that in the Material Store! ---- us arties are sad human beings :P ) I transferred the image using pen to leave an impression on the block.

With transferring and printing, you have to make sure that any text you have in your image is reversed so that it comes out the right way when its printed....or you will cry. Believe me, I've carved many a thing in the past only to realise when nearly finished and having to start again.

The next step was to carve the image into the block with mah shiny new tools...again, we get very excited when we get new arty stuff to play with.

After the carving was done and the feeling officially gone from the tips of my fingers, I was ready to proof it.  I decided to do whats known as a reduction print.  With this, you start by carving out everything you want to be white.  Then you apply the first colour, which is always the lightest colour.  In my case this was yellow.

Once all the yellow prints are printed, I'll carve away what was yellow and then apply my next colour which is red, before doing the same again and then applying black which is my final and main colour.

So I rolled yellow ink on to the block and then placed the block and paper on to the press.

The block is covered with a blanket, then sent in under the massive heavy plate to be printed.  Pull the big arm and voila! Print is made.

The next step of making my edition will be harder as I have to make sure the block is correctly registered so that my next two colours fit in directly where I want them...could be fun :P

And before I go...

;)

There's a chance I may be on my way to hell...

So we're into the home stretch of Semester One with only the bare 6 weeks left so its gonna be busy busy busy!

Last week we were given our new project briefs of either "Humour" or "Protest".  This time around we were able to choose which one we wanted ourselves or alternatively use both briefs within the one project.  When I began to read the briefs I thought protest would be easier but since brainstorming I've changed to humour.

I decided to base my project on Religion, in particular the Catholic Church.  I myself am not religious and Catholicism was always something that I questioned greatly growing up.  To be honest, I'm pretty sceptical of organised religion; in a way I've always seen it to be like some form of brainwashing cult.  While I have always remained open to the concept of a God or multiple Gods in our universe, I don't believe in the Church and the basic worshipping that goes on.  Why do we have to go to mass to speak to God, when we can have our own direct line?  Why put our faith in priests and the Pope when there are more and more scandalous stories surrounding them coming out everyday?  And I don't even have to go to the extremes of the hideous child sex abuse scandals.

You only have to look on the Churches attitude toward wealth.  A certain vow of poverty is spoken about often in religion, people who decide to dedicate their lives to God give up material things and the chance to marry to totally devote themselves to God.  A life of chastity, poverty and obedience.  And that all looks lovely on paper but in my opinion, the reality doesn't add up.

Pope Benedict says (or something to the effect!) "Love your neighbour, help the poor and needy"....yeah, all while he sits on his golden throne, with his big ass ring and more than comfortable living space.

So that's why for my project I decided to zoom in on this aspect of religion, in what to me is a humorous way but to others it could be offensive.

And yes I do realise I'm committing blasphemy but I really don't care?

For instance, how many of you laughed at this image?

So baring all that in mind, I went through a few different images of things that people worship instead of the Church and then images I associate with Religion.

So my image will more than likely be the Pope looking a bit evil. More work to be done tonight on composition before I make the final decision and transfer the image to the wood block to get it ready for carving :)