Final Countdown...Religion in Twitter..

So we're into the last few weeks of college so its all busy busy! For this part of the semester, we're focusing on etchings and woodcuts.  I've decided to do purely woodcuts for my project as this is an area which I absolutely love, it's definitely my favourite process of printing.

I decided to stick with the whole idea of Pope Benedict leaving the church, or as I should refer to him now "His Holiness Benedict"...think I'll stick with Benny though, that's too long :P

I wanted to take a somewhat light-hearted approach to his resignation, the same approach I have when it comes to all aspects of my blasphemy fuelled work.  So, I decided to bring into the project the fact that both him and the current Pope Francis are on Twitter, which I think is just gas altogether.

So I made a woodcut of a Twitter bird with a speech box with the intention of filling things with hand-written tweets "from" Benny.

I then printed this on both Fabriano paper and fabric.  With the Fabriano, using a blue ink, I left some white whilst others I did a tea-stain on them to give them an old look.

Fabriano

Fabric (as below)

After this, I filled in some tweets from Benny.

I also did a wood carving of Benny himself to incorporate into the tweets.

Again I also printed this on to fabric.

My aim for printing on fabric is to eventually sew all these together to form a stain glass window type display.  With the frame currently being built I'm working on 2 more images that I hope to incorporate into it.

Crit tomorrow so fun times ahead! :D 

......sarcasm doesn't come across well in the written form -.- 

Setting Fire to The Pope...

Sometimes, a silk screen can decide to be such a bitch.  Which is exactly what happened me when I went to print my second image of the Pope where he is walking away.  The prints just didnt want to come out right for me....it was one of those days :P

So seeing as they didnt come out necessarily usable, I decided to alter um so that I could use them.  I decided to destroy a few of them by burning, tearing, cutting etc.  Seeing as it was all images of the Pope it can show a reaction to his resignation and also a reaction against religion.

Also did a bit of a Sinead O'Connor on it....my mother will be so proud :P

Pope Benny farewell

Seeing as the Pope resigning fits in so perfectly with my whole "people leaving the church" theme, I decided to use his image in the second part of my screen print.  I worked with two images, one where Pope Benedict is looking all powerful, arms out, at the height of his "career" and another image where he has his back turned and is hunched over.

After making a series of prints on lining paper, I then decided to try printing on other materials, in this case tshirts.

I then blackmailed my 5year old niece into helping me with a photoshoot wearing the tshirt.  I wanted to show how kids are so accepting of what the church says, so easily influenced and how they can be wearing something that means a great deal but they have little or no understanding of it.  Which is exactly what happened when the niece saw the tshirt. "Who's that?" I was asked.  Then when I tried to explain what a Pope was, she couldnt understand it so we settled on "He's a priest".

Golden Week Workload :P

So in the main self initiated project, I'm working with the image of the Sacred Hearts that I found in a shop.  I decided to use this image for the three tone screen print.  Basically this process involves a lot of Photoshop which, seeing as it involves technology, is not my strong point.  The image has to be separated into three tones: light, mid, and dark tone.  

Everything black will be the lightest colour when printed

Mid tones of the print

This will be the final colour, so everything black will be the darkest colour

For my lightest colour I chose a golden colour, midtone was a brown colour and then I finished with a black.

I lost quite a lot of the mid tone brown, the print itself actually looked a lot better before the final colour of the black went on.  There was also a lot of white so I decided to add text to get rid of some of the white.

Since a lot of people say they've left the church, no longer go to mass etc. and even the Pope himself deciding to leave, I decided to make it look almost like there's a sale on and add the words "75% Reduction".

Half tone prints to be done next, perhaps the Pope will make a final appearance?

Photoshoppy Stuff :]

For second semester Photoshop class, we were given a brief in which we had to pick a site/place associated with our main studio practice and document the space, with the aim of creating prints that would then be placed in the chosen space.  Because my main studio practice is on religion, I didnt fancy having to spend hours in a church, drawing, taking photos etc as I'd been doing that already.  So I decided for this project to still use religion but in a different way.

I started to look at routine in someone's life, the things they do religiously.  For this, I chose a hairdressers because there are those women who go every single saturday without fail.  So the lovely Kathleen O' Keeffe of Trendy Locks Salon, Abbeyfeale, kindly let me use her salon as my chosen space.  Having gone to the salon for years and having worked there, I knew the place pretty well but it was interesting to just sit there and watch everything.

I started with doing simple sketches of the salon and taking photos of everything there.

 

 

Once the documenting stage was done I started to question why people go and enjoy going to the hairdressers so regularly.  It couldnt be just because they get their hair done or its done out of necessity.  For some customers, especially elderly, you could see that it was the company they enjoyed, the human interaction, the chat over a cut of tea.  That chat with the hairdresser as they do your hair is quite poignant.  People do end up just opening up and telling things to someone who in a way is a stranger to them.  Its been proven that hairdressing is a cheap form of counselling.  Hairdressers in Austrailia have actually been trained to recognise signs of suicide or just plain unhappiness in customers and shown how to help them. 

 

So going with that thought I created some small posters showing how people open up to hairdressers and the counselling aspect of it.  I plan to place these around the salon and see people's reactions when/if they come across them.