Closing the year on a high note

There a lot to be said for how this year has played out but I’d just like to stop and appreciate the fact that everyone tried their hardest this year. Perseverance at its greatest and y’all deserve a round of applause. Even if you couldn’t do everything you set out to do this year, I’m proud of what you were able to accomplish no matter how trivial. We deserve a pat on the back for making it through a fairly chaotic year. I’ve tried to keep my spirits high regardless so I took a bit of time to myself.

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I’ve been away cranking out work of various kinds. Crocheting sweaters, oil painting for (almost) the first time, and vlogging to the best of my abilities. I also managed to total my laptop trying to keep my plants healthy. She needed a reset and refresh, same goes for me 😅 I’m gearing up for the new year and trying to improve my personal practices as well as work practices. Creating comforting space has been part of it so I have been doing small home improvements like hanging paintings and cleaning my family home.

BIG thanks to everyone who bought from my shop this year whether it be in person or through the site. I’m working on new launches for next year so keep your eyes peeled for new stickers and more stationary! 😏

‘Till next time: stay safe, create peace in your space and have a fantastic day!

- E

Block Printing Experiments

Hey, it’s been a tough week but a productive one for sure, I wanted to show you some of the progress I’ve been making in my printmaking class:

We started out the semester with an accordian book project! It was a fun challenge for me to figure out how I’d like to configure it and what things I thought worked and what didn’t. All of the prints are reduction prints which was a bit of a challenge because of the multiple prints but also I have a printing press at home to ensure the best printing of the image so it was all done by wooden spoon. Honestly, it was quite fun just to play around with it and layer it. I did 4 layers of transparent black to create this lovely image of my window throughout the summer. It reminds me of hopefulness, the sun’s warmth and prosperity but then I displace it by adding these heavy contrast image of what the world looked like to me in the realm of social issues. This for me hopefully questions the complicated feelings that come about as one makes choices about what emotion they choose to honor or acknowledge.

As much as i love how it came out, there are some major things I would change about it:

1. Better images for the photographs - These are super badly printed images of places I had experienced during the summer while still under quaratine. (I only travelled to D.C. which you can check out in this post)

2. Better glueing or generally different medium - I feel like this would make much better for a zine if I were to document other peoples spaces and the particular issues that they are concerned with

3. A whole new selection of poetry: Yeah, I’m not much of a poet but I love prose. I’d love to find some poetry or some writing that compliments the message a bit better or that illuminates the issues that arise with the image. I might rewrite them but I feel like choosing a work that moves me might be more fun even though it takes more time.

I feel like so much has happened since this project, it felt refreshing to start another print making project. I spent the past 3-4 weeks working on 2 print projects one of which I would also really love to do as a book. This one was the real experiment because while making it I really changed the way that I saw my own actions while working on it. It’s narrative, it’s simple and colorful but still dark and goes through a transformation that I feel in a way everyone has had to go through this year.

Block Printing Trials

NEW VIDEO!

Starting off the week pretty well with a late night upload! I made a video using my block print that I have been carving and playing with the last week or so. I was playing with different inks and I tried a couple techniques for getting the best prints and as you can see in the video, not all of them worked out too well.

First I tried old screen printing ink I had lying around from high school with was chunky and a little hard to work with especially because it’s more meant for fabric but I wanted to see how it would perform on paper. The result was kind of iffy. I dried just a but too quickly and got in a lot of the cracks of my stamp which made it print pretty poorly even though it was the best version of it.

The second go round I used acrylic which wasn’t working out either. Not only did it dry too fast but it had the additional texture too it that I originally hated but now I think I might  use that that another project just to see how it looks or to play around with the little peaks coming off of it. I’m just glad I didn’t buy pricey in and I like the color blue so I’ll definitely get use out of it still.

The final try, I used ACTUAL block printing ink that I got from blick (go figure) and they came out much better! I still kinda messed up by dropping my brayer on the floor and in some cat hair but at least they printed pretty nice. Once I get a bit better at making them all look like a consistent set, I will add them to my shop along with a couple other new projects you should be seeing in the next few weeks so stay tuned!