Final Show Prints

Here are some of the prints Julie has completed recently. Many of these were in her Senior Show. They were made with a variety of techniques.  Screen printing, relief printing (where you carve into something), lithograph (where you make the image on a stone and then use that to put the ink on paper) and some used a combination of these with digital manipulation.

Prints

Below are several of Julie's prints, these are examples she is submitting so that she can be in the "Worlds Greatest Art Tour and Sale" in Bowling Green next Fall.  I think I'll get Julie's input on these before posting any commentary.

The piece above is Pandora's Box.  Here is what Wikipedia says about Pandora's Box:
Pandora's Box is an artifact in Greek mythology, taken from the myth of Pandora's creation in Hesiod's Works and Days.^[1] The "box" was actually a large jar (πίθος pithos)^[2] given to Pandora (Πανδώρα) ("all-gifted", "all-giving"),^[3] which contained all the evils of the world. Today, to open Pandora's box means to create evil that cannot be undone.

We love our dog, and though he's not this kind of dog, he's small and loves being with us.  This piece came out really well.  I believe the inspiration for the woman is from DaVinci's   Madonna of the Rocks.

Julie explored several prints with cat themes when she was first starting out. This one came out particularly well.  She painted a version of it too.  It's called Nemo and the Octopus.  We once had a cat named Nemo, he and his brother Magellan.  They were explorers. They didn't last long unfortunately.  One disappeared and one got hit by a car.  This cat looks a lot like our cat of 12 years Whiskers.

This plays off a similar theme, though with a dog and a kind of abstract octopus jelly fish thing.  This is a different technique for print making using copper plates.

These two are screen prints instead of relief prints.

This is Odin - she did this before the Thor movie came out.

This is a relief print on wood.  It creates a different effect. You can make many more prints from wood cuts than linoleum cuts, the wood stands up better.  To make this piece more interesting, the infant is wearing headphones and listening to an iPod.

I think the title for this one is We are Brothers. Note that it's not quite a mirror image, the head dress of one skull has symbols of life, the other symbols of chaos.

The Japanese are well noted for their wood cuts.  This was an inspiration for Julie

Another small work on copper plate.

Home Made Vacuum Table

One of the techniques Julie has learned to use in her print making classes is silk screening.  One part of the process is to use a squeegee to apply ink on a piece of paper.  It's essential that the paper not move while you're doing this.  It's also undesirable to put tape or sticky stuff on the paper.  A vacuum table is used to hold a paper in place while applying pressure and ink.

Julie found directions for a home made vacuum table. The table is 36"x36".  I made a box using 2x4's and then screwed down a 1/4" piece of plywood on the bottom side.  The top side of the table was more tricky.

The directions called for drilling holes with a 3/32" drill bit.  Well, that's nearly a 1000 holes.  I used my neighbors drill press for a little while, but couldn't get to all the holes.  My neighbor Lindle decided to help and we drilled all the holes in one go.  We broke about 7 bits in the process.  We also wore through nearly 3 cordless drill batteries.  It was a lot of work.

The next day I put some supports in the box, sealed the lid on and drilled a hole for the vacuum hose.

Below is the lid - see all the holes?

Notice how the vacuum hose gos in the side of the box?  It really works and hold paper very still.

Hollyhock

 

Readers of the gardening entries on this blog will know that I have an experimental streak in me.  Frequently I get mystery plants coming out of my compost, or remains of some plant that rotted last year that decided to grow this year.

All our pumpkins last year were like that, we didn't know what they were until they started turning orange.  We thought they were just a weird squash (turned out they were small pumpkins), too small for Halloween, but just fine for eating.  We had some really good pumpkin soup, and will be planting pumpkins purposefully this year.

We also have had tomatoes spring up.  It's always interesting to see what you'll get, and I figure, if the plant really wants to try that bad, let it go for it.

Well this year, these things started to grow up, not too far away from where purple pumpkins and okra were planted last year.  The leaves were kind of squash like (see above), and so I decided to just let them grow.  After a while, they were just too bushy to be squashes, so I thought they might be okra, or some okra weird hybrid thing.  It was in the part of the garden I really didn't have plans for yet, so no worries, I just let them grow.

Then it started sprouting all these flower buds, and last week instead of squash or okra looking yellow flowers, we got these pretty pink things.

It turns out they are hollyhocks.  How on earth they got there is an absolute mystery.  There aren't any other hollyhocks around.  Maybe bird droppings, we really don't know.  These things will last years, so I guess it's their new home.  They grow really tall, these ones are over 6 feet tall now.

So, now you know a little about hollyhocks.

My mother reminded me of a favorite painting of hers. "Girl among the hollyhocks". A lovely painting.

Julie has been doing a lot of work in the shop lately to get it organized. It so happened that she was dressed up for a social event (and looking pretty good I might add) and decided to take some pictures of herself in the shop, here they are:



You can see from this picture how far the shop is from the house. In the background is the pottery wheel and several sturdy tables for doing ceramics.
In the next few pictures you can see our sturdy brown table. We bought that shortly after we were married at a used furniture place. It used to be a BYU conference room table. It is really heavy. I hate moving it.



This area of the shop is where the sink is at.

Julie is very proud of her shop.