November Silkscreen of the Month
For the November silkscreen of the month, I wanted to do a similar technique to Molly Crabapple’s May Day/General Strike poster with Occuprint. Take a watercolour painting of hers and transform it into a dirty, multi-colour silkscreen. This one ended up being 6 colours onto 140lb white French paper.
This was Molly’s original piece, a gorgeous painting of a dancer inspired by the Ballet Russe, which if you don’t know about it, you should totally read up on them. Especially about the influence of artists at the time.
So I broke down the painting into 6 main colours – the textured, vignette background, blue grey shadows, the red headdress, the white highlights, pink shadows, and the black outlines.
Here’s a screenshot (with my phone, hence the striations) while I was in the process of doing my separations of the original image next to my new canvas. I believe this was still missing the pink shadows and white highlights still.
You can see here from the start, the difference in colour quality of printing direct onto pure white paper vs the transparent background. I felt it made the inks laying on top of it more rich and vibrant in a way that dealing with straight mixed ink colours wouldn’t have been able to achieve.
Aaand, finish! The series is already sold out on the Etsy, so you’ll just have to believe me when I say it is awesome in person.
Leave a Reply
About
Pages
Archives
Tumblr
This is an example of supercooling – the process by which a very pure liquid is chilled to a temperature just below its usual freezing point without actually making the jump to its solid state. Bottled water is perfect for this, especially the kind that’s been purified via reverse osmosis, a process that strips water of all its particulates. This particulates can act as “seed crystals,” or “nuclei,” to which a liquid phase on the cusp of becoming solid can attach, and crystalize around. In this video, a seed crystal is introduced in the form of a cube of already-frozen water. As soon as it’s introduced, the liquid phase rapidly crystallizes and attaches to the solid one, kicking off a chain reaction of ice-formation.Water that freezes as it’s being poured out of the bottle also solidifies upon exposure to a seed crystal, which, in this case, is an already-frozen surface. This is similar to the effect observed when freezing rain, supercooled by its flightpath through sub-freezing layers of atmosphere, comes into contact with an object cooled to a temperature below freezing. The result is a phenomenon known as glaze-ice, which – if you live somewhere cold – you may have seen before, coating the spindly extremities of tree branches.
OMGSCIENCE!
