In my third day of sickness, there is no progress on any artwork. Didn’t go to class today (a very good idea) and I’m trying to save up enough strength so I can go tomorrow. Not only are my final comps due for Graphic Design 4, but we’re registering for classes. I need to go to Letterpress because all of my work for that class has been neglected (not entirely my fault seeing as the slew of visiting artists have been occupying the press I need). That’s what I hate about getting sick – the surplus of work I’m going to have afterwards. I don’t know how I’m going to finish it all without getting sick again.

I might as well attempt to clean my room so I can have some space to work on mounting my GD assignment. My floor is a wreck.

No progress today, I am officially sick. I don’t know what happened. Right before I went to bed last night, my throat was scratchy and I knew that was going to be bad. But I had no idea it would be this bad. When I woke up, my nose was stuffy and my throat was much worse. I was fine for the first few hours, then it just kept getting worse. My head feels awful and my entire body is sore (from god knows what). I’ve had this constant pain behind my eyes since 3 or 4pm and there have been no signs of it lightening up. I’m trying to eat the Pad Thai that my roommate so kindly brought back to me, but even that is tricky, because after every bite I feel like I might just hurl.

This is really irritating because I’m a workaholic and I physically am unable to do anything without feeling like I’m going to collapse. Need. to. get. better.

I work in a very confined space, here in my apartment. But I still feel the most comfortable here. Working in the Dolphing building is uncomfortable at best – too many people, not enough privacy.

Anyways, what I’ve been doing today is painting over the prints that I made. I have two layers screenprinted – the first is a very translucent green halftone. The halftone is really large, the largest dot is probably a quarter inch in size (probably won’t do that again…), so I didn’t want it to take over the image. The second layer is the background to the mountaneous forms that I’m used to doing in paintings. Basically a flat shape of color. Made that one too faint, so it didn’t cover enough of the halftone layer or the monotype background that Nick suggested I do. I was pretty unhappy with these two layers while I was still at Dolphin, and ended up just stopping at that. I’m glad I did because I came home and proceeded to cover them with washes of gesso. I love gesso. So much more than just white acrylic. The texture is really nice and it gets really satiny when you sand it. I’m already excited about these prints again.

This is one of my favorites from what I did today. I’ll try to get some better pictures tomorrow when the light is better and I’ll do a bigger picture post tomorrow. But about the print, I think the green halftone layer sits really nicely on the monotype background. This one is a lot more subtle than the others, I suppose and that’s why I like it. I like it when you can get really close to work and find nice surprises in the details. I’m going to wait a little bit longer and sand down the gesso so I have a nice surface to screenprint on. The next layer for this print will either be a hand drawn layer on textured film (it’ll have the texture of a drawing) or a really fine halftone of a watercolor painting I did. The smoothness of the gesso will be pretty important in regards to the detail that I get.

I really enjoy making halftones of watercolor paintings. There’s so much detail! And it’s such a good way to add value to a screenprint.

In addition to reworking the prints that I’ve already done, I worked on some more backgrounds for other prints. I think I prefer painting directly on the paper as opposed to the monotypes. It’s very tedious to do the monotypes and then it’s too…bold and graphic for a background image. Maybe I’m just not as good at it and that’s why they’re terrible. Well, not entirely. But anyway, better results from the paint.

I can’t really say this is the beginning, even though it is the beginning of this blog. The pieces I’m working on right now have been around in some capacity for over a year now. I’ve just started working on these pieces at the beginning of the semester and they’re going pretty well. Obviously not as fast as I would like, but nothing good comes out of rushing a piece of art, now does it? Pictures and explanations to come in a few hours (I’ve got to eat, afterall!)