Anticipatory snapshot of the transparencies for the Industrial Trust Bldg prints.

(The postcard version, seen at upper right, is still un-finished…) These transparencies were made at Faces, which is a great graphic output place here in Prov; they can print transparencies that are solid black and perfectly aligned (unlike a photocopy or laser printout, where the blacks will always be slightly transparent and the image will always be a little distorted). With the small detail and close tolerances of this print, the fancy transparencies were totally worth it.

I printed the first color on the Industrial Trust Building prints, then took a break and did the second chapter of a screenprinting workshop for artist mentors at New Urban Arts. The awesome Emmy Bright (with squeegee below), who is a recent arrival in Providence and an Arts Mentoring Fellow at NUA, set it up, organized the logistical aspects, drove me (and prints) around town, fed me, and in general helped me out SO MUCH during the end of November/beginning of December! A million thanks!!!

At the workshop, we printed the postcard-sized skyscrapers on STICKER PAPER.

We ran out of time, and since the plasticky sticker paper doesn’t absorb any ink, a hairdryer was pulled into action to get these dry enough to take home.

Here we are achieving some good eye-breaking-ness!! (plus awesome clouds via rainbow-roll experimentation.) I was pretty exhausted & running on pure will at this point; pushing hard to get the larger skyscraper prints done before the Craftland opening on December 5th. This session of printing fun stickers — in order to demonstrate alignment using a hinged plastic sheet — gave me confidence that the prints would look good, and got me psyched again about screenprinting’s magical ability to create images that people love.

One of the participants also said later that they were glad to get to print an image of mine, instead of a random thing that someone had just come up with as a demonstration… that it showed them the possibilities of what could be achieved. I know what that feeling is like from the learning side of things — when seeing an example of work in a new medium, you want to be inspired by awesomeness, kicked in the pants to get out there & make more awesomeness yourself. It’s eye-opening to me to realize that my work can play that role in people’s lives… I am flattered and touched and it’s super meaningful. Thank you, Sarah, Jadrian, and Emmy, for being part of this night! and also for having patience with my sleep-deprived wackiness.

Watch out for these guys around town, your eyes might get broken.

From here on out it was a race to the finish line, another day and a half of nonstop printing.

Born of necessity, innovation:

A drywall screw driven into the side of the screen frame, with paper rolled & taped around it, allows you to easily lift up a screen that is smaller than your printing table, and/or that can’t be positioned so an edge sticks off the table for easy grabbin’. The paper roll rotates around the screw, so you can handle it to move the screen up and down over and over again without wearing your skin off.

Printing prison…

I offered myself the possibility that I could stop printing these in the middle of the run, if I got totally exhausted. I decided not to — my track record with finishing interrupted print runs is not good — it’s generally taken me a year or more to complete them. So, even when I was totally beat, in the early morning of a sleepless night before the deadline for which I only really needed 50 or so prints, a couple more hours of pushing through the run looked a lot better than a year of an unfinished project hanging over my head. So, there are now 345 of these! in 5 different colorways. Man oh man.

After going through the process of mixing the transparent shadows for the Durruti prints, I had a real sense of competence with the transparent colors here, and got psyched about being super picky. This is the moment of the final color decision for the blue shadow on the gray-sky skyscraper (with rejected color variants lying below):

Cutting the ‘tails’ off at Jim’s shop, with the giant guillotine:

Emmy, still rocking hard as the “print caddy”, dropped me and prints off at Craftland…

… and I sat down and put the barcode labels on them just as Alec Thibodeau was beginning to hang the ‘print wall’.

I think I have accepted the fact that I live almost my entire life in the realm of the “Just In Time”. I could beat myself up about this under-the-wire, deadline-focused scenario every time that it happens… which is pretty often… but really I’d rather just be psyched about what I do get done, apologize & offer beautiful prints to the people who get inconvenienced, & keep going.

taking you Back In Time!!! … a whole pile of process images from printing the Durruti/Ruins posters. Process work from the Industrial Trust Building prints is coming in the next update, this one got way too long.

Mixing colors. a) they’re not all oranges and blues (!) , b) look at that nice set of blond-beiges, moving right-to-left, getting ever closer to the beige in the sky on the yellow-gold Durruti print.

Green-sky Durruti print, seen through the screen that is about to print the blue shadow. The pink of the QTX emulsion and the yellow of the screen fabric always make such weird and awesome colors. Maybe someday I’ll make a print that is as eye-breaking as this.

Trying out transparent colors for the blue shadow on the green-sky prints. The transparent inks have to be printed through the screen to show their density and hue accurately… At left is the first attempt (too purple). The final color was somewhere between the two on the right. I am excited to do some more experimental stuff with transparent colors; they can be a little bit of a hassle to print, but the way they lie in the paper (instead of on it like the solid colors) is so beautiful.

When you are setting up your transparency on the screen prior to shooting it, remember to think carefully about how the image you are going to print will fit on the paper and how the paper will fit on your table under the screen! Or else you will end up with your screen sticking halfway off your printing table like this. In the background, AO is keeping me company, or rather, checking his email while I grumble & rant about making stupid mistakes like this one.

Also here, as Mr. Punch would say, this is *not* the way to do it.

Use caution when you open the door to unshaven young men who have moved into thin-walled schoolbuses for the winter; pretty soon they’ll be running up your electric bill in their desperate struggle to stay warm.

[a hairdryer in the studio? yup, for speed-drying color test swatches. They only show their true color when the ink is dry.]

After all that hassle, it actually works!

This moment is always pretty magical. In this case, it was extra exciting: I’ve been trying to finish / thinking about / talking about re-printing these Durruti prints since last fall. A stack of paper with just the sky color printed on them has been sittiing around the studio since last December. I’m not sure why it took me so long: there were even a bunch of people who wanted to buy a copy, who I had been emailing back & forth with saying “if you can just wait a couple of weeks! I am about to finish printing them!”, also since last fall.

As I got to the point in the above photos — actually seeing the third and last color on the paper — a large weight lifted from my shoulders, and (not to over-dramatize it) there was a deep feeling of relief. I was antsy to print so I printed, not really thinking about it too much… but in the ensuing days, wondering why it had taken me SO LONG to get back to printing this thing, I realized that I had been completely afraid of it — that it had been pretty much PURE FEAR that was keeping me from working on it.

Fear of what? I am pretty sure it was just fear “that it was going to be really hard”. And in the end, printing it with tricky alignment, mixing the transparent color which I thought was gonna be super difficult… not that hard. Not easy, but interesting, lots of fun, and ultimately successful. I was really scared of color matching to the original prints — and I didn’t get the color totally matched — but the color that I mixed was better than the original color: better contrast, better looking, better overall. Answer: Nothing to be scared of.

Hey, what the heck is going on here? Why is the emulsion two different colors and all patchy-looking?

When I initially conceived the Durruti print, I wanted the sky to be lighter than the paper. I had bought this yellow-gold paper, and wanted to print white over it for the sky and the bright details in the ruined building. So, I printed the white layer, and then went ahead and printed the blue shadow over it. Then, I began to have doubts: the text in the sky wasn’t readable enough. In the building, where the white areas were separated from the yellow by outlines, it looked great — I liked the way it popped out. But the sky, and thus the message of the poster, were too subtle. What to do?

To get the contrast I wanted in the letters, I needed to somehow print a darker color on the sky, without changing the white in the building or covering up the blue shadows. I didn’t want to cut up or modify the transparency itself, because I knew I would want to use it again to print other versions of the poster. Also, at that moment (over a year ago now), I didn’t have time to re-shoot the screen, or a free screen to shoot… There was a lot of argle bargle-ing… but eventually…

Using the screen through which I had printed the white ink, and placing it over a misprinted copy of the print for ‘tracing’ purposes, I took some of the emulsion and painted in all the white areas on the building that I wanted to keep, or areas of blue shadow that I didn’t want to print over. I re-shot the screen so that emulsion would harden… then a beige color (which can be seen being mixed at the top of this post) was printed through that screen.

The photo doesn’t quite show the contrast as it is in real life, but I’m pretty psyched about how it came out. And — more color variations & experimentations will happen in the future!

Vibration pattern on the surface of my un-drunk coffee:

It was sitting on the print table while I was printing. The main axis of the pattern (lower left - upper right in this photo) is parallel to the direction in which the screen moves up & down.

Jori Ketten, a local artist/photographer/teacher/co-conspirator (etc), helped me out immeasurably by taking documentation pictures of my prints — soon to be seen here. She also did photoshop magic on them (which would have taken me many, many hours). They look great, & she deserves a million shout-outs. Hopefully you won’t get sick of them. Thank you Jori!

I’m closing in* on being done with these “superman” building prints. The “text on the poster” problem has been solved, courtesy of Stephen Brownell, who sent me an old postcard (date unknown, printed in halftones) that included the original name of the building: the Industrial Trust Building. Constructed, of course, by the Industrial Trust Company. Well, there’s no way I could have come up with anything more beautiful or poetic than that, so that is what is going on the poster: along with the word ‘Providence’; which made a lot of sense and felt right, ultimately.

In Italy, love of your home city or village, no matter how tiny, is called ‘campanilismo’, ‘bell-tower-ism’: the tower is what you can see from far away and identifies the place to which you long to return. As a proverbial generalization, Italians are said to be ‘campanilistic’ as opposed to ‘patriotic’ — devotion to the specific small place of origin outweighs any broader loyalty to the abstract, constructed idea of the nation. This building serves us pretty well as a bell tower.

After learning the name, I was able to find out some more:

• on Wikipedia (it has its own wikipedia page!)
• on “Skyscraperpage” (skyscraperpage? fascinating)
• … it remains the tallest building in Providence!

Here’s some more process. The best part? Possibly.

Here are the two layers close to complete in Photoshop. This was a snap with the cell phone camera the way the lcd screen looks gives it the gradient (approximating the rainbow roll in the sky of the finished print), and creates a weird, colorful moire pattern (which the finished prints will not replicate!). Looking at this picture on the cellphone screen is the impetus for making a gray-black-and-white ‘minimalist’ version…

Drawing letters; a sequence. Some pictures taken with cell phone camera so the focus & detail are iffy. Watch the C, D, and Es change.

Now it’s time for some kerning! (aka. figuring out how far apart the letters need to be in order to feel evenly spaced. The spacing doesn’t end up numerically even, especially with wacky letterforms like these, but ideally the positive & negative spaces balance each other out, nothing is crowded, and legibility is increased!)

Here, the pink letters are the kerned ones. You can see the slight horizontal adjustments between the two texts, opening up more space or pulling it closer together… you can also see my final adjustment of the “N”, cutting it out of the tracing paper, moving it over a 16th of an inch, and re-taping with scotch tape! Here’s a larger version.

I do this by tracing the letters again, one by one, on a new piece of transparent paper. Starting with the first and last letter spaced the necessary distance apart, I work inwards making slight adjustments, moving the new paper around over the original drawing so I can visually judge the shape and amount of the space left between the letters. It’s kind of repetitive, sometimes involves a lot of erasing over and over again, and is totally not the fastest way to do it. BUT as David Gersten says when people ask him why he draws on paper instead of on the computer, “Why would I want to spend less time thinking??” Bzam.

Here you can see knife cuts in the rubylith where I’ve sliced through the softer red layer but haven’t pulled the red plastic off of the clear layer yet:

Here you can really see the difference between the kerned and non-kerned text. Compare the spacing of “OVI” and “ENC” in both sets of letters… (larger version)

A final layout, with the postcard from Stephen. It’s from the opposite side of Kennedy Plaza (obviously from before KP was KP; it seems to have been some kind of leafy park… any Prov. historians out there got information to offer?), but it’s surprising how similar the angle and the majesty are. Someone pointed out to me the asymmetricality of the building; it’s true, it’s totally weird.

Here’s a grainy closeup of the letters showing just how much they changed between tracing and rubylith. The rubylith letters are vertically shifted from the traced ones, but the horizontal shifting all came from the kerning decisions!

Okay, that’s it for tonight, time for BED.

Craftland put one of my prints on their online store, and makes a deserved comparison to science-fiction virtual worlds! Yeah, I couldn’t even keep perspective drawing out of this super-simple, gradient-on-black, print of the helpful cat Buio. Lots of other prints of mine (inc. different versions of the Industrial Trust Building print) are at their holiday sale, till Dec. 31st… as well as many prints by other awesome Providence printmakers. If you’re in Providence, check them out! Blatant sales pitch! yeah!

Oh, if you’re looking for yet more obsessive silkscreen process, I recently came across LesliePVD’s blog, where she’s documenting her artmaking & printing processes, including most recently: screenprinting on linoleum tiles to make patterned floors!! She’s got a lot of great photos & descriptions of technique, much is learnable! Providence does spit out some awesome dedicated maniacs, does it not?

* Actually, this update was begun almost two weeks ago (Dec 2nd?), but I was too busy working on finishing the prints themselves to have time to go through the process photos to post them here. So, this is totally way old news. An update with the completed print is next! I also just came back from New Orleans, with fewer drawings than I would have liked (it rained all week), a copper plate partially etched, some photos, and lots of thoughts, which I will try to sort out & write about in upcoming updates.

… this is an interim update to let you all know that I have not fallen off the earth. The Plant Sale poster is done, more images soon. We made a garden at our house (building four raised beds and two planter boxes out of old stockade fencing scavenged from the empty lot next door!) and planted seeds, we’re getting more plants at the end of next week. I’ve been working on making a website for my brother which is not functional at all: problems have to do with Arabic/English language switching and I am in over my head. As Andrew says: “you really should not feel bad about not being able to understand a complicated programming language just by looking at it!” to which I say “but…. I want to understand everything!” All these things are not possible within our human timeframes, I guess…

In any case, I am stopping all of that stuff (for now at least) because I need to draw and print. Drawing! Printing! Yeah! There will be an update on the print series progress soon, it is all insanely late, I know.

In other news, I won a dirty apron contest.

Also, here is a cool picture of the plant sale poster being printed in the early, early morning. In the glancing light from the eastern sun, you can see the pale green transparent ink, just printed, lying over the other colors in a layer that has actual *thickness*. Click to see the large file. So sweet!

Finally (and only a week late, really) the layout of the bread poster is done! Actually, really only half the layout is done, since the transparencies for the other two colors will be made by hand. However, that will be the relaxed part, this work on the computer made me a little crazy, with its pretenses of / pressure towards precision…

The two transparencies for the text and the line drawings will be printed by the very professional and excellent I-O Labs in Pawtucket! It’s costly, but really not that expensive in the grand scheme of things: and at this point I’ve messed around enough with these layouts on the computer that I don’t want to mess around any more with piecing them together from photocopier transparencies…

As you can see, this idea has shifted its format away from the previously mentioned vertical poster style. Here’s a screen-captured fragment of a version of that one:

…which was just too hard to read, besides which, I ran out of room on the paper (which is stuff I had around from an older project, cut very precisely in long strips (7.375″ high) on the big cutter at Black Cat).

The sequence of the steps simply flowed better horizontally, and for some reason I could fit more in. No theories about this right now! Here’s the main poster layout (center) with the two color layers at top and bottom:

One more detail:

Conclusion: lots of fun to draw stuff freehand with ink & brush on Bristol board. Less fun (though rewarding in its own way) finagling the scans around on the computer, in a seemingly endless fashion. Satisfying to have it ready to go (still, however, there’s that computer-work feeling of “but isn’t there more I could do?). Scary to be turning it over to the printers’ and hoping the transparency comes out well. I’m predicting it’ll be hard for me to print accurately since it is so long, lining things up will be a pain. But overall, I am pretty psyched with this concept and execution, so far.

Next step thoughts: One of the other layers will be rubylith cutouts to track the shape of the dough through the process… The other one will be messy ink painting and scraping on mylar, to form large letters behind the line-drawings and to highlight the path through the sequence. This color will be printed low-contrast to the paper… maybe even just transparent base to change its value a little… we’ll see…

…and yes, this is what I used my extra hour of daylight savings time for!

I made these images for a poster for a Labor Studies Department lecture at UMass Dartmouth. The design of the overall poster (which will be computer printed, not silkscreened) was more or less set by the designer who made the posters for the first two lectures in the series, so my main contribution to this one was these drawings. I learned a bunch of new things in Photoshop & Illustrator to enable me to turn them from pencil sketches into these nice colored guys. (Thanks B, Arthi, Adam, & Andrew for advice… and patience!)

I’m making the different colors using a bunch of transparent layers in photoshop… thus getting some kind of color unity within the drawings… it’s been interesting to do something similar to what I usually do with rubylith, but in a different medium.

The lecture (obviously?) is going to be about how 1960s & ’70s feminist ideas about women’s equality & creative lives apply to wage-earning women. Wednesday, March 5th, 1:45 pm, at the UMass Dartmouth Library browsing area.

Edit The final poster modified, approved, and sent to the printer! I started Thursday night, and finished Monday morning, so this was a four-day project. Fast (for me).

The prints are done — as of last Thursday night/Friday morning.

I printed the seventh color on Wednesday night/Thurs morning. After I’d printed about six copies, I realized that I had run into a classic transparent color problem, which I had expected to happen at some point along this process… but hadn’t looked for at the very end.

(background information: the previously promised transparent color mixing notes.)

It is especially hard to predict how the transparent colors are going to act when printed: what they look like is determined by the amount of pigment in the transparent base, and by how thickly it lies over the other colors. You can test solid colors by wiping them with a brush or your finger on a piece of paper, but with a transparent color you have to print it through the screen to see how dark or light it will be, and how it will change the color behind it. The transparent base I use also makes the printed colors a little bit iridescent, so they are darker or lighter when you look at them from different angles…

So, the ‘classic problem’ comes from the transparent color unpredictability combined with the hope of the printmaker that the color she mixes, at a certain density, will turn out to be the correct value to create a bunch of different effects in different places all over the print. In this case, the large text needed to be dark enough to be legible, but light enough to reveal what was behind it; the small handwriting text needed to be not too dark (so it wouldn’t show up as a blobby shape of its own) and not too light (so it could still be read); the small drawings of people in the rooms needed to be dark enough to be seen clearly…. and the wall in one of the upper bedrooms needed to be a light enough value to contrast with the wall of the hallway, and push the room walls a little further into the distance.

As printed, when the large text and the small people in the rooms were legible enough, the walls of the upper room were waaaaaay too dark. Since I was using the values of different colors in the print to try and create the appearance of receding space, this kind of value conflict — which actually made the room walls almost the darkest thing in the composition — was non-negotiable: it totally broke down any sense of space in the upper part of the print. After a couple moments of frustrated contemplation (post-midnight), considering various possible solutions, I decided that the best path would be to finish printing the transparent blue as planned, and then shoot another screen with just the wall shapes on it, and use that to print a transparent light color over the dark areas.

So I did end up printing an eighth color after all, Thursday night into Friday morning. It left me completely exhausted… and if I hadn’t written about it, you would probably never have noticed it.

However! the prints are finished.

I am working on a letter that will go out with the prints, that should be done tonight. Prints to out-of-town subscribers will be mailed out tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon, and prints for Providence subscribers will be ready for pickup after that — I will also do some delivery runs around town.

Then it’s on to some more exciting stuff…!