When it comes to anatomical accuracy, I like to use print ads, catalogs or magazines for reference. Here are two models I have used for reference and the pieces I used the references for.
The reference used for “Glimpse”, a graphite drawing that was later made into an intaglio print, was a model from an
The reference for the piece “Gynoid V.2.0”, a linoleum print, was from the Fall Clearance 2009 catalog of
My mess on the table...
For the last three weeks I’ve been taking a summer class in silk screening my college provided. It was my first
time ever doing silk screening, and it was a lot harder to do than I had initially thought. First off you get wet a lot… or at least we did, since we had to rinse our screens out in such little sinks, and –which I had not anticipated- you have to wash your screen out every few prints to keep the ink from drying in the screen.
So this was my first screen, on to which I exposed multiple images. I chose the Gynoid from previous works, an Automaton Propaganda poster, an image I had tried to make into a wood block at the beginning of the summer, and an image of a woman with VR goggles that I had found in an old PC magazine, with some text I added in PhotoShop. Each of these images were traced with a Sharpie marker, and then photocopied to bring up contrast and strengthen the black. The copies were then dampened with baby oil to make the images transparent, and help adhere them to the screen.
Even though the time I exposed my screen was a bit longer than any of the other students in the class had exposed theirs, about 1 hour and 15 minutes, the emulsion didn’t harden enough, and blow-out occurred in several of the images while removing the softer emulsion. I tried to do as many print of the successful images as I could before they deteriorated too much, and blew the screen out to get ready for the next batch of images.
I plan to revisit most of the imagery in the next batch, as I wasn’t quite satisfied with what I got in the first attempt. I will, however, be shifting over to lithography in the class now, but I will try to find time to revisit silk screening.
Looking at the woodblocks of other artists, I realized how I should be approaching the carvings, and set out to put as much in a composition as I could, while keeping large masses of black, and not relying on contour lines. I also added hatching and cross hatching to add value to cretin areas.
What resulted was the first piece that I consider to be part of my label CtrlAltRobot. “Urban Robo”, as I would eventually call the piece, was also the piece that started my ongoing theme of technology, and the focus on robots. It was also the piece that I started to develop my own style that I would try to integrate into all of my pieces.
The robot in the piece was supposed to be like one of those old school robots you would always see in those really old science fiction TV shows, like Buck Rodgers (even though I’ve never seen any of that series), and were essentially what the people living the 1930’s would have imagined a robot from the year 2000 would look like. It’s clunky, gear driven, and obsolete. Its memory capacity is really limited; probably no smarter than a calculator, but it’s frick’n huge, so people are panicking when one shows up in the middle of their city, even though it seems to be posing no threat what so ever. People are just afraid of 50 foot robots
The print displays the citizens of the city looking out of the windows of their apartments, all reacting to the robot in different ways. Some are screaming in horror, some are trying to escape, some are oblivious to the robot, and continue their daily lives. What is the meaning of the robot, why is it here, does it pose a threat?
While I was looking through a pile of old magazines for a collage in one of my art classes, I came across an odd and unique image. It was a photo of a woman, passing out pamphlets in the street while wearing a large and bulky sign promoting a newly opened copy center, and a cardboard computer over her head. It was such a weird scene, yet she was able to make it sexy with short shorts and a pair of high heels. The idea of making technology sexy was such a great novelty to me, it was so weird and wacky, and I loved it. I tore the page out and still have it today. A few years later I decided to use my newly acquired skills in the print making form of intaglio to try to reproduce the image in a print.
There exist two series of the print, the first few lack the hatching, and are just the contour drawing. A few prints later minor corrections were made, resulting in the print’s current rendition. I intend to do more with the piece when I have the time.
This woodblock print is titled “User Friendly”. It features three robots playing around with a human. Each robot is from a different point in time and space. The robot on the right is the future robot with an advanced design and telescoping arms. The one in the center is an alien design robot with tentacles and a single optical sensor. Finally, the robot on the left is the retro robot that relies on moving gears for internal mechanics and has outdated optical sensors and limited maneuverability. The retro robot is also the robot that’s featured on my first robot print, “Urban Robo”.
I wanted to make a piece that made the robots look more like children than towering monsters. Sure they’re enormous and emotionless, but they’re also limited in their memory capacity, and were created to help humans in their menial tasks. Basically they’re harmless, but they are large and curious, they think they’re helping us, but they don’t comprehend death or realize if they’re causing harm, making them dangerous.
The design for the print started out as a pencil sketch, and was redrawn on a large sheet of sketchpad paper, and transferred onto the woodblock with tracing paper.
The hatching in the background first seen in the “Urban Robo” print returns to not only continue the design in the first one, making it apparent that they’re part of an ongoing series, but also retain the original purpose of breaking up the large amount of flat black color surrounding the composition.
In the future people will look at the ancient, bulky iPad, and question what they were thinking. It’s a huge thing in our time, it will probably become an icon of this era, and serve as a precursor that will lead the way to all the wondrous devices in the future, but it will become obsolete in the future, to the point that it becomes humorous. People will make sitcoms that take place during 2010, a truly wacky time in their eyes. They will write in a character that has just purchased the iPad, and is completely overwhelmed by its capabilities. The audience will laugh at the enthusiastic character as he reads the specs on the back of the box. “A sixteen gigabyte hard drive, 3G wireless internet”, it’s a dinosaur compared to the devices the people watching the show all have at the time. We, however, will buy one from a garage sale to recount memories of days gone by, a simpler time where you didn’t need a cybernetic implant to read the newspaper, which you’ll be able to read on your toaster, if you could figure out how it works. When we show our grandchildren the iPad, they’re eyes will open wide in amazement. They’ll ask if people really held that thing in their hands when browsing the internet, and we will blow their minds by telling them that people used to sit down when they used computers.
I got this idea one day to try to do something similar to the Matrix movies, where they plug people into the computer via a port in the back of the persons head, or how they download information and memories form suspects in Ghost in the Shell. Basically I wanted to do a piece featuring a woman having information being downloaded into her mind via cybernetic implant. However, I wanted it to look a little lower tech than the other two so I gave the woman a helmet with a bunch of wires coming out of it. Sort of like the old mind transfer machines that mad scientists would invent in old television shows. In order to push the idea that information was being downloaded into her mind I ran the words down and loading through her eyes, like they were flashing on a screen in her head or something. I also thought it made her look like a cyborg.
The method I used for this piece was intaglio; it’s a form of etching, and one of the older forms of printmaking.
This is the plate that I make the prints with. The process for doing an intaglio piece is pretty interesting, involving acid to etch the lines you draw into the plate, making a recess to hold the ink in.
It’s still a work in progress, as you can see additional line hatching was drawn in later to add more value. I’m still currently working on the piece, removing lines from the composition, which is a whole nother process called scraping and burnishing.
