end of a really short era.

okay, i did the best i could to get these up in a timely manner, but since i suck a little and held out for so long already, it did not seem fair to draw out their debut even more by posting separately. so, all at once, here are the last of my screenprints, "just in case", "take me away", and "not in the closet or under the bed", respectively. the last one was in the print exchange that we did in combination with the letterpress class next door to us. it was pretty okay, i got a couple pieces that i liked a whole lot, so that was a win.

now that the class is over, i'm thinking about how to go about my work for the rest of the summer, and how maybe, just maybe, to incorporate screenprinting (or some of the things that i learned through the process) into my upcoming work. i liked it a lot, like a lot a lot, but practicality is nearly non-existent with the pursuit of screenprinting as a method of illustration. also, my screen was snatched before the class even ended, another lovely hiccup in the road to becoming "alissandra the screenprinter." so i'm considering other applications of the breakdown of shape (ahem, *coughcollagecough*) and line, to go about things a little differently than i have been. hello, experimentation phase. stay tuned for some inevitably bad illustrative tangents coming soon.

and, as a last ditch effort to recover some of the costs of wooing my new friend screenprinting: since i have a whole lot of duplicates of these bad boys (and my postcards, and my misleading second grade instructional resource poster about things that may or may not fly), if any of you are dying to have, say, a giant toothy monster shadow on your wall, let me know and i'd be happy to hook you up. they're cheap! okay, shameless and marginally convincing sales pitch over.

too bad the stamps they sell at postal ops are dumb slash ugly.

as promised, here is the postcard set that i screenprinted. there are two "hi"-type cards, two "i miss you"-type cards, and two "you're swell"-type cards for all your postcard sending needs, all spoken by inanimate objects of sorts. clockwise, we've got a camera, a mountain (slash jello mold, according to one of my classmates--oops), a banjo, a coffee cup, a lamp, and a cupcake. yay!
i ended up screening 28 sets of these, though there were definitely some (read: many) casualties in the registration process. and besides, misregistered/streaky/flawed screenprints are part of the charm of the medium, yeah? sort of badly done or not, i like them, so i may revisit the idea for my extra-mega-bonus assignment(!!) that i am going to be able to squeeze in before the class ends next week, now that i suck less. i finished up another print yesterday, and, barring any sort of catastrophe, will square away my fourth (and last required) print tomorrow. rather than drag my feet on this last piece, i think i can squeeze one more print out of the class, while i still have access to the facilities. we'll see, but either way, keep an eye out for those other two at the very least coming up!

brought to you by the dolphin building.

i've spent the better part of the last eleven days of my life in the dolphin building (which, as it turns out, is named for the street it lives on, not for any other highly unlikely but far more exciting reason involving a mica patron that just happens to be a friendly water-dwelling mammal. i mention this only because i went to - and gave tours at - this school for two and a half years before i figured out why the hell the printmaking building was called the dolphin building, apparently because i'm very dumb.) moral of the story is that i have only not been there when eating (actually only sometimes true, as my morning yogurt and coffee is consumed daily in class), sleeping, or spending money on screenprinting things that i can't so much afford. there was also a highly fruitful trip to the book thing (baltimore's free book store slash best thing ever) in there somewhere, which yielded many a book that i had been eyeballing and/or longing desperately for, though it definitely did not help the "downsize your life to move next week" plan i have been trying to put into action. but enough about that.

the class is actually really great, as is the professor, whose face is screenprinted onto his apron (but in a good way, i promise). his music collection has remarkable overlap with mine, so the cds played in class sound like my ipod on shuffle. or what my ipod on shuffle would sound like if it weren't way busted. who knew ipods made the sad mr.yuk, x-ed out eyeball, tongue-lolling face when they were dead? not me until right now. anyway, the only "assignment" for the class was a four-plus color 11x14 traditionally editioned print of fifteen. following that we have two open assignments and an optional print exchange. it sounded more terrifying to do that much work in two and a half weeks before i, well, did some of it. here's my editioned print, "some things that can fly." at first it seemed like a weird instructional resource poster for second graders. so i added some things that in fact CANNOT fly, so the smart kids will know better and the awesome kids will throw their toasters out the window and see if it sprouts wings.

i've actually finished my second project as well (see above, re: every waking hour), a set of postcards with well-wishing inanimate objects on them, but i just finished xacto-ing all 28 times 6 of them apart, and am now too tired to find the nice ones for scanning and editing and uploading and etc. so later. plus, there's more suspense that way, right?

also, june 1st marked the first day of my weekly daily upload goal, which is to say that i plan on uploading my daily illustrations once a week, instead of just drawing them for five months and now knowing what to do with them after the fact *coughmerightnowcough*. i'm still working on what i might do with said five months. any brilliant ideas?

departure, or, wow i love being not a fine-artist.

so here are a couple things from fibers, the only really substantial things i made in that class. the other large projects were a weaving (in which i wove mostly yarn, but also blue painter's tape and vcr cassette tape) and a presentation on victorian crazy quilts, spawning the first image, my final for that class. the rest was just in-class putzing around. overall, i suppose i really enjoyed the techniques we learned in that class, that was basically every type of fibers manipulation ever, but the class was still steeped in the crazy fine-arts attitude that i had forgotten existed since i'd been in illustration. that part pretty much sucked beyond the telling of it, but other than that, i was okay with it.

so the crocheted crazy quilt is not so much a quilt at all, but a glorified blanket, essentially. there was a loose concept tied into the fact that crazy quilts were luxury icons of "look how much expensive scrap velvet and silk and time i have on my hands that i can afford to lavish the surface of this quilt with embellishments and stupid little butterflies, etc.", while crocheting was considered "low art" associated with prostitutes. there was a bit of research i found indicating that they were called 'hookers' for all the crocheting they did (though nichole gives a different version of generation of the nickname). the surface has my full name, "alissandra corinne kachidurian seelaus", and the year crocheted on the surface, as an "IN YOUR FACE" signature, claiming the supposedly low art piece emphatically as my own. plus it's, you know, prettier that way.

the bottom part is my screenprint, painstakingly cut out off contact paper leaf by leaf on three screens and printed. i printed about two yards, and each leaf is about the size of a quarter. it's printed with dye, so it's embedded in the fibers of the cotton, not a surface treatment.

the end. i like the idea of making things (scarves, blankets, etc.), but fibers doesn't like being commodified. which is too damn bad, because i did it anyway. having these non-illustration classes is pretty okay in that regard, getting to make actual tactile objects (last semester, i made a book in photo.) next semester, the non-illustration elective will be ceramics. tea and coffee and such abound.