iPhone - the wait is over!

Finally we can all run and get an iPhone - Thank God!

Don't we all thing that Apple overdid it a bit with their legendary secrecy this time? Apparently even Apple's closest partners - the ones who are actually designing and manufacturing accessories for the iPhone - couldn't get one to make sure their stuff actually fits properly around an iPhone. Which is just silly. You can read more about this in this cnn article.

Well, this definely required poking fun at, so I designed a little something for cafepress. Check it out in my new iPhone Accessories Cafepress store. I hope you'll like it! :)

PS: Can you believe that? Cafepress deleted my store within hours of me posting it with a braindead excuse that I was supposedly advertising other services (meaning: I had my email signature in a message on a board, and that signature happens to contain my web site address on it) Which is ridiculous. I really loved CafePress over the years but they are becoming just too stupid and stuck up to me much use. I used to recommend them for all kinds of Tshirt design needs, but I will stop recommending them and I will probably move all of my cafepress stores away from there too. They don't need my business in the future!

Stop Art!

Well, not really...

A while back (March?) one of the members of our art critique group suggested we should all try to do a bit a guerilla art. After some pondering I came up with the idea of a painting of a stop sign. I scaled the painting just so it would fit perfectly over a regular stop sign (it turns out that a 24"x24" canvas on regular stretcher bars fits perfectly). So it's a painting of a stop sign on top of a stop sign. Art!

I had tons of crazy ideas related to the idea... how about just leaving the piece hanging on the stop sign and see how long till it disappears? What if it never disappears? What if nobody ever notices?

But then I also got worried. Real stop signs have a number of safety features built in, like being very visible at night etc. What if I left the piece on there and an accident happened at that intersection - possibly caused by somebody not seeing the sign. And so forth. So I took it down again.

But I had a number of additional ideas for that series. The original piece is now know as "Stop sign" (or "Mr. Stop sign"). The next one is "his dislexic brother". And the last one is "Son of Stop sign" (half quarter the size and in lower case, of course ;) ). Below you can see the whole stop sign family as it is today...

I wanted to do at least two more but never got around to them. Then, today, a friend sent me a pointer to this blog posting for a Craigslist stop sign project. Neat, I thought. I guess I should finally put a blog post about my own stop sign project up. And here it is. And a pointer to this blog entry is in the mail to that craigslist stop sign project, of course :) And now I'm thinking of continuing that series after all... at least a few more based on some ideas from my friend Bernie... Well, stay tuned :)

A little print for a print exchange

Finally I find some time to get to know my etching press a bit better. As my first project I was working on a small print that used drypoint and roulettes, titled "Contemplation". And just as I was getting ready to print the third state of the plate I re-discovered that there is a print exchange happening in Seattle where they are looking for small format prints. An excellent opportunity. So I printed an edition (I needed 15 prints for the exchange and I made a few extras for myself). They are maybe a bit less consistent than I'd like them (chalk that up to my lack of experience with drypoint) but overall it's a pretty nice print. Paper format for this is 7" x 5" so it really is a pretty small print. Printed on tan Rives BFK with a mix of yellow ochre and raw umber.

The print exchange is put on by PrintZero studios, Brian Lane. And you can find more information about the exchange on their web site. I assume that all the pieces submitted to the exchange eventually will show up on their web site.

The last litho (at least for a while)

My classes at SJSU are over - and so is my access to their print-making facility. And therefore, no more lithography for me - at least for the time being. I'm pretty sad about that, because I do enjoy the process a lot and I hope I'll have a chance to do more lithography soon.

Here are photos of the last two lithographies I did at SJSU. One of them is actually done on stone, whereas all my other lithographies this semester were done on aluminum plate. The top one (called "grasses" for now) is the one I did on stone. I decided to try a reductive process, a bit like I would do a reduction print with linoleum. It sounded like such a good and easy idea... well, it was much harder than I thought. And not only because I probably had a pretty hard stone. I worked on the stone by scraping with a razor blade. When that didn't seem to do much I took more radical measures, like scraping with a knife's point, screwdrivers and in the end I did a hard-core acid bite on the stone.

For that you use 50 (!) drops of nitic acid on 1 oz of gum, so this is a really strong etch. The etchant literally was smoking. I dropped that on the stone directly to bite out parts of the image. In that print the first color was the blue, over which I printed green. There are some round "holes" in the green. That's where I did the acid bite :) It was fun, to see how the stone started to smoke and bubble up each time a drop of that stuff hit it. It was also a bit scary, because that was indeed a very very strong etch and you should never take playing with strong acids lightly. It turned out to be a fairly interesting print, through I considered it more of a technical exercise.

The other print was developed out of some beautiful wood texture. I had found some old and weathered wooden boards on a construction site. I'm planning to use them for a woodcut. In the meantime, though, I did rubbings of those boards on tracing paper (with medium rubbing crayon). I put those transfers on the printing plates and ran it through the press at high pressure, which transfered the wood grain to the plate. One plate was mostly the wood grain. A second plate was the wood grain and additional tusche-work. The result is this two+ color print which reminds me very much of a landscape, although this is really almost a coincidence and wasn't planned that way. The reason I call it a 2+ color print is that the green is actually a very very subtle rainbow roll from a slightly blue-ish green at the top to a more yellowish green at the bottom. If you don't know about it you'd never notice because it's so subtle - just like I wanted it. I think this might be my favorite print I did, so it is a fitting final posting about my lithography work this semester.