Moon Birds

This is one of my first experiences with printmaking, and so far my only encounter with silk screen. I made this piece during an after-school art program when I was in high school (I think; it may have been earlier than that). The layer using orange ink, which produced the tree-like shapes, was masked out with torn pieces of newsprint — once the ink was applied, it stuck the paper to the screen, which allowed for multiple prints to be made. The blue layer, with the birds, was masked with conventional masking fluid.

This is a good example of a stream-of-consciousness piece of art. Why birds? I don’t know; as far as I remember, they don’t have any significance beyond “why not?” Why is one of them sitting on a moon? I have no idea! Still, I kind of like the way the blocks of color turned out on this one, despite being completely unplanned.

Bird/Dragon

Assignment: produce 2 contrasting images on 2 plates using various etching techniques.

This was one of the projects for my university etching class. The plate on the left depicts a house finch; the plate on the right, a dragon. Apparently I was stuck for inspiration, since that’s when I tend to bring the dragons out. These two plates incorporate drypoint, hard ground and soft ground etching, as well as aquatint and sugar lift. (The paper is actually off-white; the grey tint is a result of the scanning method.)