Printmaking

Printmaking Excuses

· February 28, 2018 · Content · , , , · No Comments

I am sorry that I didn’t post last week. I have one excuse and it isn’t a good one. I wanted to wait until Saturday to post because the D&D sessions I have been running would be over and then I would be able to write about those.

The problem was that I got really busy Saturday and then I was also trying to think back to the sessions to see if any of the content was extraordinary. It wasn’t really. There were funny parts but nothing I could make an entire blog post about.

Although, one of the least foreseen and most interesting parts of the sessions was a part where I added a bandit encounter.

Now I’ve been playing D&D for almost a year now and I don’t think our party has ever fought just a random group of bandits. We’ve never had to face the moral dilemma of killing someone vs. sparing their life with the chance that they might keep their bandit ways.

A day or so before one of the sessions began I added a bandit encounter and it became one of the more pivotal parts of our campaign. I did not intend for this. In the middle of the fight our rogue convinced the bandits to stop fighting and we could spare their lives. It worked.

There were two bandits left. Our barbarian immediately dispatched one of them right after they surrendered. Kind of cold blooded, but in his defense he was raging at the moment and he’s a stupid barbarian.

Now there is only one left and one of the party members decides to interrogate him. Then after the interrogation he decides to shoot an eldritch blast at him. No questions, no hesitation, no resistance, no justification, just murder of a now defenseless bandit.

So after what was supposed to be a meaningless bandit encounter our “good” party had to come to terms with the fact that they are evil, or letting evil get away with it.

That was the only truly significant snippet from the campaign.

Aside from that, a couple of weeks ago I made a new print.

20180216_005257

I made this print with the idea that the phrase that you can find everywhere “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee” was always a little too aggressive. It might as well just be “excuse my bad behavior I haven’t had coffee.”

Since when has lack of coffee ever excused anyone from anything serious? In what cases would that phrase ever be fine?

“Sorry for yelling at you, I haven’t had my coffee.”

“Sorry for speeding officer, I haven’t had my coffee.”

“Yes I do plead guilty for premeditated murder but in my defense I hadn’t had my coffee.”

And it became such a terrible excuse that I just had to print it.

So I made the block and I wanted to print it on bloodstained paper, to help point out how aggressive really is. So I got some red food coloring, and colored some water and put it on the paper.

All in all, the process to make the print was much more fun than a lot of the other prints that I’ve made, my only complaint with it is that the “blood” really just looks like Kool-Aid.

That’s all I really have to say for the rest of this blog post. I intend to host more sessions of D&D sometime in the future and I intend to make more prints. If I do either of those I’ll make sure that I keep the blog up to date.

Sorry I didn’t make a blog post last week, I hadn’t had my coffee.

Print-Making the Grade

· October 22, 2017 · Content · , · No Comments

When I first went to college, I wasn’t exactly the visual artistic type. Aside from the doodles that everyone draws in the margins of their notebooks, I didn’t draw much. I didn’t paint. I didn’t create visual art like that. In high school I was artistic, I was in band and played music, I just wasn’t visually artistic.

In college I had to take a fine arts credit, since I decided not to be a part of the band. I had to actually take a fine arts class, all of which are deduced down to music appreciation, jazz appreciation, and art appreciation. Going against all of my musical learning that began in the 6th grade, I decided to do art appreciation.

The format of the class was awesome. It consisted of being in a giant lecture hall of about 100-200 students and having a PowerPoint full of art that we would just discuss. Sure there were a couple of quizzes and stuff, but all in all it was just sitting and discussing a ton of different pieces of art.

And then I learned about printmaking.

Printmaking, in a generic sense, is the process of making a block (or some template medium) that you run through an inking process and then transfer to paper. Unlike other mediums you can just keep reproducing the image as well (at least until the block is worn). The trickiest part of most forms of printing is that you have to do everything mirrored, so when you place your block onto the paper it prints the correct direction. I have a couple of pictures with the blocks in them down below to help you understand what I mean.

So upon learning of this awesome form of art I went out and bought a beginner lino-cut printing set. This consisted of a couple blocks of linoleum, some ink, and a couple of chisels that are used to cut out the linoleum.

The result of my first actually decent print was a printing of the gnome child meme. Meme right here for comparison.
Image result for gnome child

I since come to the realization that I inked the block pretty badly on that one. After that I produced a couple of other things, and the only other one that I really liked was a pointy-hat confused bearded guy (I should just make that the title of the picture).

Then, for a good laugh (which is the reason I create most things) I made a print of a printer. Neat.

 

The next significant thing I made was a garlic bread print, where there was a hot piece of garlic bread and kanji (hopefully saying garlic bread, I got it from google translate so it’s questionable). It had been so long since I produced the last print that I struggled to get the inking right, and after printing off a ton of them, I was able to get a cool looking gradient. So without further ado.

And just recently, inspired by a dumb internet meme (another main source of inspiration), I made a print of Steve Harvey that summarizes most episodes of Family Feud.

And that is all I have. If I create any new prints that I think are funny, or a significant improvement in quality, then I’ll probably post them here.

Until I post again, have a great week!

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