I've been working for a couple of weeks now on a couple of long-term fascinations of mine -- painting with a limited palette in a grid, and my wife's beautiful face Two older examples, my 1995 4x4 foot self portrait in eight colors painted in half-inch squares 'by the numbers', and 1993 "Nana Rita" 4x4 feet painted 'from life' while looking at a 40x40 pixel grid on the screen of my computer for weeks on end: The acrylic paints I used (from ETAC are, except for the white, trasparent pigments. The overspray from the darks really ate up the lights, and the overspray from the white ate up the darks, so there's a huge variation in dot size and in color which I didn't intend. In order to get this to look ANYthing like the (wonderful) intensity of the 'plan' (don't you just LOVE tiny bitmaps?), I'm going to have to knuckle down and paint the 216,000 dots by hand. Any idea how long THAT might take? Couple of weeks, I suppose... But how COOL will it be with so many little Hershey's kisses paint dollops? Cool, I think. And I want to see that badly enough to just DO it! So... Enough Golden fluid acrylics (so I can apply by syringe, I hope) should arrive any day now and I can get started with some more needlepoint work (now that my stocking is done) in paint instead of yarn... I'm kinda dreading this, but I WANT this painting to be 'right'! Hopefully a GORGEOUS canvas full of bright intense colored dots will eventually become 'real' -- Mike Labels: painting
the needlepoint I've been working on (from Linda's happy design) 
plan for "Linda" 75x45 inch painting in 8 colors
plan colors for "Linda"
"Linda" painting underway -- click image for 20 second movie of painting (0.5mb)
blue complete, crimson just beginning
detail showing blue and crimson dots
airbrushed dots completed on large canvas (75 x 45 inch image area)
At the opening of the Kemper Museum "Backstage Pass" show last month, master printer Mike Sims of Lawrence Lithography Workshop invited me to design some images for him to publish. I made half a dozen designs for him and he selected "Jim", a litho using six plates, three of various transparency white inks and three of various transparency black inks on mid-value paper.
I experimented with a number of possible paper colors and decided the Tan was most appropriate for the image, although likely too light -- but I really wanted the paper (not ink) to establish the mid-values as it peeks through all the tiny spaces between lines and through the transparent inks used in four of the plates.
In order to create the mockups I actually created program files as though I were going to make these drawings on my CNC machine. Then I spent a few days writing a new program to convert my drawings into AutoCad DXF files which I loaded into Adobe Illustrator. This was VERY cool (to me) as it allowed me to experiment with various line thicknesses and transparencies and paper colors in order to optimize the films for the plates by 'seeing' accurate previews of the finished print before any plates had been burned or proofed. The image below is reduced from one such full-scale mock-up.
click image for nearly life-size mock-up (2mb PDF)
"Jim" 42x30 inches, lithograph from six plates on Rives BFK Tan paper
pre-production pricing -- contact Lawrence Lithography Workshop for information
I'd originally imagined we could 'dye' white paper a nice mid-gray using sumi or other water-based pigment -- my thought here was to print lighter and darker inks so that the paper color becomes the mid-range of the image, the image being produced from cross hatched squiggley lines similar to my recent drawings.
I tested my paper-coloring idea and abandoned it as beyond me. LLW suggested printing the entire sheet gray, but that was unappealing to me... It's important to me to maintain the 'paper' quality of the paper. So I tested the design, trying out various available papers and decided on Rives BFK Tan which is dark enough for the image and adds a very appropriate color.
In order to accomplish the drawings for the plates, I wrote some (very cool) code to prepare my squiggly lines for a local pre-press shop to produce films from which Mike Sims and the Lawrence Lithography Workshop folk could make the litho plates.
The films for the six plates arrived today and they are pretty spectacular, actually! WOW! I'm SO excited and happy to see these -- and very satisfied to have more or less precipitated my ideas into 'reality' so directly and effortlessly! Here's a photo showing Aaron Shipps (Tamarind Institute master printer and Mike Sims' assistant) with some of the large film positives from which they'll make the plates.
Master printer Aaron Shipps with films for "Jim" lithograph.
Plates were burned from the films yesterday (10-17-2007) and they turned out GREAT! Totally amazing to me what perfectly clear sharp lines appeared when the plates were developed. This is going to be a very successful print, I think, and the scale is terrific. VERY exciting, and very gratifying that Lawrence Lithography is investing such an enormous amount of time and money in publishing my work!
Master Printers Aaron Shipps and Mike Sims develop plate
click on image to view movie of plate creation (00:03:30 4mb)
Printing should begin on Monday!
October 25-26, 2007 -- first proofs of "Jim"
click image above for movie (3.5mb download) pulling first complete proof
Mike Sims (foreground) and Aaron Shipps (background) inspect proofs at LLW
First proof of "Jim" (click image for detail)
amazingly close, I think, to my mock-up (first image in post)
but whites are too cool and perhaps too opaque in the proof...
The BFK paper has turned out to be too light in value to provide the mid-values the image requires. We're considering various measures to darken the paper... Tea-staining the BFK Tan to make the paper darker overall, printing a flat over the entire sheet, printing a 7th plate in a mid-value under the image (I've produced an image for film to accomplish that, but that method is pretty far afield from my 'pure' concept of lightening and darkening the paper through cross-hatched squiggles, so I'd much prefer either finding or producing a darker paper than under-printing the 7th plate...
November 5 and 6 proof on BFK Tan paper which I printed mokuhanga style from two blocks (first printing a cherry block in a blue/green, and then an ash block in a neutralish red which gave the pronouced wood grain)
The proof above might be the direction we follow for the print. In this one, a silhouette in dark brown was printed on top of the mokuhanga style woodgrain printing, then the six blocks in whites and blacks was printed on top. Today, I'll run over to LLW to print four more sheets in a similar fashion, but a bit darker, and we'll try to eliminate the silhouette plate. The middle black in the print above was TOO transparent, I think, and didn't pop properly, so we'll try to fix that as well. Lots of work ahead before it's ready for editioning!
Jim dropped in to see some of the proofs at LLW 11/28/2007
More to follow as the edition proceeds!
-- Mike
Labels: drawing, Lithography, Woodblock
¶ 5:58 PM 5 comments links to this post
Today I completed something a little bit 'different'... Looking back to the velvet paintings displayed at the 5 and dime when I was a kid -- maybe they're still up there today -- hula girls, Elvis in all his glory, typical 60's kitch in stiff opaque color practically glowing out of that black-black velvet... Well, I didn't so far as to actually paint this on black velvet (which would have been pretty nice in a retro-leisure-suit sort of way -- but I'm just not that 'cool' I suppose).
So this is painted on stretched linen in transparent titanium white acrylic on a carbon black ground.
self portrait, Oct 11, 2007, 60 x 40 inches, acrylic on stretched and primed linen
click image for nice enlargement
Just getting started
click image to view Windows Media Player movie of painting, 700kb download, 35 seconds)
I first painted the entire canvas black, then applied many layers of white paint in order to build whiter and whiter lines out of previously painted white lines -- so each successive overpainting made that area whiter and more opaque.
The only dark values in the painting come from the black underpaining -- nothing but successively more opaque white was used to produce the image.
Up close, it's pretty intense and interesting because of all the stringy white squiggles and circlets from which the image is constructed...
-- Mike
Labels: painting
¶ 12:28 PM 0 comments links to this post
