Sunday, July 24, 2016

Big Fox, Little Fox

Little Fox, Big Fox
A busy week in Artlandia!  

I finished and printed the little fox from last week (thumbs up!)  I have big plans/ schemes for this block - I'm going to try combining two of my processes [steeples fingers].

 Looking back and evaluating blocks, two of my favorites, are the full scale head and hands from a year ago.  To make these, I carved them small first, then printed and scanned, blew them up, transferred to a new block, then recarved to scale.  

Sort of complicated (true.), but I think the multi stage process works well because in the first round, I can see the object as a whole and make the decisions about the light and dark, and in the second round, I can focus on refining the details. So I tried that with the foxes here and carved a life-scale block of the fox head this week.

Life-scale fox head from this week - app. 9 x 10"
The next part, will be like a process I used with the raptors, another favorite.  There I used multiple blocks for different sections of the body (this has the advantage that I can easily switch out the heads like an art-Princess Momby.)

The difference here will be a material change - instead of using the soft carve sheets that I used for the raptors and the fox head, which comes in 9 x 12" sheets.  I'll blow up the small fox, print it on polyester lithography plates, and transfer it onto a piece of MDF to carve (the same material I used for the Gothic Tree).  It's a hard and slower-carving material, but it's economical and readily available in large sizes.

Speaking of the Gothic Tree...I got one of the prints up on the wall in the studio and tried my first digital collage from the scan of the branches :D  One of the awesome things about the digital collages is that they can be made any size, so I made one version of this one to fit a specific unusually sized frame.


first digital collage from the Gothic Tree scan!
Other art activities - I'm still working on the life-scale figure [doh.] I keep adding details, like the ring and the gold beads in the center of the flower which are sewn on and knotted after each one [double-doh.]

Fortituuuuuuuude!


 

In para-art news, I got to see an Amanda Palmer concert!(!) I wanted to go, but crowds in general make me nervous, and I'd be going alone, so I dragged my feet on buying a ticket. Then, the afternoon of the concert, when I realized I could get a ticket for the price of 3 fancy cups of coffee and walk to the venue (the lovely Basilica Hudson), I knew I'd kick myself if I didn't go. So I did. (Great story, right?! :p) Two Thumbs Up! 

No puppy photo this week, but the nature shots are indirectly puppy-related.  I have aussenwelt photos from this week, for the first time in a little while, because Honey is learning to sit and wait nicely while her human puts that little box over its eye and gets all excited - such a good, patient pup! 



Not my best composition, but no color correction on this - weird right?!
 Last, but not least, the flowers of the week!