Gorilla Unexpected (!!)

One of the final assignments for class was to carve a gorilla stamp out of a linoleum block (good times!!) for making prints. The gorilla could be in any style so long as it was carved with a greater composition in mind involving the primate appearing unexpectedly among at least two other people.











I'm so glad everybody else in class agreed that zombies count as people.

As a side note I'm also happy that a lot of the materials I used to make the gorilla block & prints were recycled. The practice print bristol paper had some other light drawings on them already; the plastic spoon (aka ink-to-paper distribution device) I used came along with my take-out order for lunch that day; the cardboard & plastic used in spreading the printing ink were picked up off the side of the road during a walk over the weekend; and the piece of metal that prevented me from severing my digits while carving the block was some random abandoned ikea furniture accessory I found lying around my house (and still in its plastic). Hooray!

Nightmare (& Dream) Acrylic Paintings

As an antidote to the time-consuming nature of stipple, our next assignment was to use acrylic paints to illustrate a dream or a nightmare. I'm lucky to remember many of my dreams so coming up with ideas for this assignment was a cinch, and I ended up developing two of them simultaneously - painting one while waiting for the other to dry & vice versa.














The nightmare painting (done on vellum-textured bristol board) was the one used to fulfill the assignment requirement that all parts of the image be blurry besides one bit in sharp detail. It represents this reoccurring problem I have across various dreams (which as a result become nightmares) where I lose control over my eyes. I'm usually pretty cranky when waking up from dreams like that.

That reminds me! During the digital video editing techniques class I took in my senior year of college, the prof showed us an experimental video called "The Wold Shadow" by Stan Brakhage. I can barely keep my eyes on it for the duration of its 3 or so minutes because it evokes how randomly blurry the world looks to me in those kinds of nightmares! The video itself may seem a little dated (nightmare baggage aside, the blurring and sharpening effects make it look like he was just having a field trip with slider bars in an image editing program to audiences in the 21st century...) but don't let this deter you from looking up the writings & work of Mr Brakhage, as he has a lot of pretty interesting stuff to say.















Anyhow, to counter my nightmare dashed out on paper I also created this painting (on a preprepared canvas) of my favorite reoccurring power in dreams. Thankfully I have many more dreams where I can fly (if I get a good enough running start) than blurry vision nightmares...

*Around 1:34 in this trailer shows an example of how I fly in my dreams:

Stipple Portrait (pencil shading plan & final)

So, what is stipple? Ah, all ye ignorant people, consider yourselves lucky... Hahaha, just kidding! Stipple is a handy shading technique where tonal ranges are expressed via innumerable little dots:














The results are quite lovely, but the challenge is that it requires a significant investment of time AND concentration for an entirely stipple picture to come out well. Interestingly enough, although the prof gave us the option of creating line drawings to then fill in with stipple, most of the folks in class went straight for the all-dots approach.

I am pleased with the end results of my stipple portrait (of "Colonel" Funkhouser by the River Kwai...) but I definitely had more fun creating the pencil shading plan for this assignment instead.