Sunday, July 21, 2013

DPP, Part 2: Heron Silkscreen (incomplete project)

Heron at Morikami Gardens, 2007
A silkscreen workshop at 90+ degrees ain't so bad. When you wash the emulsion out of the screen, you're pretty much wet to your forearms and depending on the height/shape of your water source, your belly/chest/lap/feet get a good soaking, too. I did enjoy working in nice, cool water but remember lamenting the amount of water gushing out of the tap and am hoping to find a more efficient way to complete that step of the process.

  
Digital image created from photograph for screen
Due to the hot weather the emulsion baked onto to the screen more than expected, and the water pressure in the utility sink faucet could not wash away the exposed parts of the image. We took it outside to try the hose, and determined to clear the last bits of emulsion, I squeezed the hose on and blasted my screen from an inch away. I cleared out some of my image in the process, hence the title of this post. Below is one of the prints I made to test the result of my close encounter with too-high water pressure.
Right side shows result of rinsing away too much emulsion

The instructor, Sarah Coyne, is awesome and offered to remake the screen for me and I look forward to my second attempt.

I think silkscreen is a great way to give my photography new life and I have more ideas brewin.






Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Dismissing photo paper, part 1: Heron Silkscreen

I want to bring my photography off of photo paper and onto other surfaces... like different paper, fabric, wood, metal...

I want to try all kinds of things, but you have to start somewhere so I signed up for a silkscreen workshop.

Instructions from instructor:
 You can make a screen with ANY design you want but it the image must be BLACK with no shading

NO SHADING?! Tough for a photographer.
I looked around for high contrast images. I was wooed by my cityscapes and, as usual, every tree I ever took a picture of... especially bare branches against the sky. When I searched online for inspiration I saw a lot of that floating around and felt sort of uncreative. (No offense, fellow artists. We all love trees!)

And then I found this heron and I am excited about creating my first silkscreen. I'm not done editing the photo to create my transparency, but you get the gist. I took this photograph in December 2007 at the Morikami Museum & Japanese Gardens in South Florida.



My first experiment exploring alternative ways to share my photography will take wing this Saturday!