Tuesday, April 18, 2006

My latest two pieces

It is almost end of April and I have to get ready for a show of paintings I'll have in June at the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting company. There are two rooms there and quite a while ago I decided I'd like to put a whole series of my oil paintings on burlap in there - all in earth tones. I think this will reallly look good in that particular setting of un-plastered brick walls.

I think I have enought pieces to put a good show together, but I am planning to make one more piece because I have one more large piece of burlap stretched and primed and if I want to show this last piece I really need to paint it this week because it will take a while to dry enough. Although I'm using Galkyd Lite medium now and the oils dry relatively quickly, I found that these paintings have a noticeable smell for a few weeks. It's an odd smell of linseed oil and pigments (cannot explain it any better because the pigments really don't smell). I actually like the scent, but I know not everybody does. And as these pieces go into a place where people want to enjoy their coffee and food, the scent has to be gone by the time they get put up. To make this long story short: the last painting either gets finished this week or it won't be in the show.

Well, when I have the piece done it will get posted here. In the meantime I have two other new paintings I did 2 weeks ago. One of them is oil on burlap and quite different from the earlier pieces in this series, except the great flower, because these pieces normally are not figural. I wanted to really hint at a torso, not be quite as obvious as it ended up being. The result is still quite interesting, I thought.


The other one is just wavy forms again, they might be plants or not. That one is done in oils (again my home-ground oils) but on sail-cloth. Obviously the texture of the support is much smoother here and the paints look very different on this kind of support. The painting came out ho-hum, I thought, but mom came to the rescue: she suggested glazing over the piece with bright reds and yellows. Now this is something I normally don't do in these pieces because they are mostly earth tones and my home-made paints. But this time I decided to try it anyway and I was quite impressed with the result. As you can see this pretty thin glaze totally changed the painting, and I think for the better. Interestingly it also made the painting very glossy (probably because the percentage of medium in the glaze is so much higher than in the rest of the painting).

Monday, April 10, 2006

Security inks

Today's post is about materials, namely printing inks. I typically print with water based inks for quick test prints and then use oil based inks for the real thing (more cleanup so I use those when I print several prints not just 1-2 tests). Although I do relief prints, I typically use etching inks and change the viscosity of the ink using burnt plate oil or flash oil. I hear some people use lithography inks the same way.

Recently I discovered rubber based inks in various letterpress classes I took. That was a totally new kind of ink to me but I quite like them. Rubber based inks - in essence - are commercial printing inks, like you would use in commercial presses. But they work really well for letterpressing and also for relief printing from the few experiments I have done so far. And as I just found a source for smaller quantities of these inks (meaning: I don't have to buy a minimum of a 1 pound can of each color) I'll probably use more of these in the future.

But what I really wanted to write about is a neat web site I just found when I looked up information on rubber based inks. A company called Gans makes all sorts of commercial inks, including inks I never even thought of. And looking at all the inks on this page I started to wonder what interesting and unusual art projects might be possible with inks like these...

Imagine a linocut that becomes visible only when rubbed with a coin, or that can be seen only from an angle or that has to be submersed in water to become visible. Think of a print that looks one way when dry, but the owner knows there is a second hidden print on the art piece that will appear only when the artwork gets dropped into water. But till that happens, it is invisible.

I must say I'm very tempted to order some of these inks, just to play with those possibilities.

Here is the page I am talking about

PS: An interesting tidbit of information about rubber based inks that I found on the gansink.com web site: Rubber based inks dry by substrate prenetration only, therefore they should not be used on coated paper, mylar, plastic etc. This information is on this page. Another thing about rubber based inks: As I mentioned I found a source for smaller quantities. Essentially, somebody who is buying large amounts and filling the ink into tubes. However, I noticed that rubber based inks are reeeeally stiff and so it's pretty hard to get the stuff out of the tube. You can get it out, but it requires a bit of work ;) Still beats throwing away half the can because it dries out before you have opportunity to use it -- if you use the stuff only every now and then, like I do.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Now for something completely different...

Today's post is about a piece that's totally different from anything I've ever done before. Actually, this piece started as a "practical joke". Then it turned out to be much much more work than I anticipated, I got ambitious, and that's how the piece turned out the way it did. In my other life I work on user interfaces for software. In that job I often create prototypes or, more often, sketches and mockups of user interfaces. As I feel quite comfortable using traditional media for these sketches (many people prefer to do such work using powerpoint or similar tools), these sketches often are hand-drawn pencil or pen sketches, sometimes colorized with colored pencils.

After I got into fine art I often joked that "my next UI design will be done in oil on canvas". Finally, I decided I needed to make good on that threat. Except, that this is not my next design (I couldn't show that here because it probably would be confidential information) but rather a painting of a screenshot of the user interface I worked on last year: The TPC 3.1 Topology viewer. I won't talk about it in detail here (booooring) but just say that it turned out to be much harder to actually do than I thought.

First of all, it's acrylic on canvas, and not oil on canvas mostly because I ran out of time (I needed the piece at a certain date), and acrylic was just the more appropriate medium for this task to start with. The piece is also quite large: 30" x 40". Then came the issue of colors. It IS a painting of a screenshot after all. So the colors have to be somewhat correct. But acrylics don't come in "Java Swing UI - Window title bar purplish/blue". Therefore the project started out with several hours experimenting to mix approximately the right colors. It didn't have to be exactly right, but it had to be close enough that when somebody saw the piece from across the room they should have that initial response of "what the heck... somebody just posted a large printout of a screenshot". And then they would look at it closer and notice that it's not quite a screen shot. Then they would walk closer and notice there are just lines where there should be text. Then closer and notice that this is not a screenshot at all!!! Closer - "oh my gosh it's a painting"!!!

I soon realized that I had never painted long straight lines. Surprise... I didn't even have the right tools to do that! I ended up having to buy several new brushes for this project. Another issue was the text in the painting. There is LOTS of it. There was no way I would paint all of it. The goal was not to make a photorealistic rendition of the interface, after all (the canvas I chose was also way too coarse for photorealism). I ended up hinting at the text as straight lines, which works well. But there were a few lines that were too large to be indicated just by lines. I did those as squiggly lines. In hindsight I wish I hadn't done that - it would have been better to stick with the straight lines. But it works well enough.

So it definitely was quite a challenge - a fun one. I can highly recommend such a project as exercise. It really teaches you about the limits of your technique and forces you to learn new ones, using tools you may not have used before, or using your tools in a way you never thought of before.

By the way: the "practical joke" was meant for my colleagues who had worked with me on that project, of course. I wanted to watch them walk into the room, see that piece, stop for a moment, come closer, frown, smile and eventually crack up laughing. Judging by there reaction at the show the piece was a total success :)