First - I made an art-expedition to Zea Mays to meet with fantastic printmaker-animator Lynn Peterfreund about how to go about animating my prints. It was a very productive meeting and when I came home I got to work making some short attempts at animating my marbled paper and animating the swallows. I was using software I'm very familiar with from mking digital collages, but learning new features. Even though these are short, I'm figuring out some important things (like how to export the file as stills, change the timing, etc.). Fundamentally, I'm still thinking about how I want to go about this. I like the marbled one, which is based on individual scans of my marbled paper. The swallows one, I could do it this way, by photographing stills, but I may also try it a different way, more like the digital collages, by scanning the relief print, turning it into a digital version and then moving the digital version along a path. I'm also still exploring software options for how to combine the two videos. (Hmmmm.) A very long way to go, but it's a start!
The other thing I did - I finished the snow leopard's body, a 24 x 30" MDF block! I think I'm happy with this, but it's hard to know for sure without proofing it. I set up an appointment to return to Zea Mays next week to print (Whoop!) Since the splendid 70" Takach press will be all mine for the day (ahhhhhh :) ), I also plan to print the unicorn body and large landscape block, neither of which has ever been printed on a press, and, if that goes well, also the fox body and Gothic tree, neither of which has ever been printed on the color paper I now use as the default paper. We'll see - some of it depends on whether or not/ how much, I need to make any changes to the blocks that haven't yet been printed. I'm very excited to see how this and the unicorn body turn out. If I get a few good prints of those two, it will be a day well spent, with the rest being an excellent bonus.
The other, not very visually exciting, but still very important task that has been in the works is sorting, filing, scanning and archiving the last few months worth of prints.
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| Here are all the blocks all together, just double-triple-quadruple checking that the scale and direction matches on all of them. |
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| It was a fitting time to work on a snow leopard. |
