Living in Kansas City, I get to take advantage of the wonderful resources of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art whenever I want. Amazingly enough, this year for their Chinese New Years Celebration, they have hired my class of printmaking majors to print 1,000 prints to hang in an installation for their big celebration. This year is the year of the horse, so our prints are meant to reflect that. This will become a three layer silkscreen print.
Aerial Aggression
Lithography on Arches Cream
8 X 10
2000 Sacrifices
Lithography on Chipboard
7.5 X 11 “
“In"danger(ed)
Lithography on Chipboard
7.5 X 11 ”
These are the reversed scans of some sketches I’ve been working on for my first ever lithography class. Eventually these will be drawn onto stones and reworked into prints, but for right now, there’s just ink drawings. Really, they would make much better etchings, but that’s for another time.
Anteater:
I have never drawn on wood before, so this was another first for me. Done in fine point black and brown pens and watercolor washes, I wanted to make a light-hearted drawing about another beloved species of mine. After so much time spent reading articles about global animal rights issues and watching heart-wrenching documentaries, it was nice to still make something in the same subject that didn’t hit on the negative effects surrounding a species, but rather depicted a unique animal from an appreciative viewpoint.
4 X 2 feet X 1 inch
Over Exploitation:
Over the course of the last six months I have spent increasingly more time studying and researching cases of animal abuse, neglect, brutality, exploitation, endangerment, and extinction. A human ecology class I took in my spring semester really opened my eyes to just how much human action is unknown or covered up around the world. With polar bears being my favorite animal, the discovery that 20,000-25,000 polar bears are left on the planet has left me enraged and disheartened. It was this realization that steered my artwork in an “animal rights awareness” direction.
4 X 6 ft
Flooster:
This was a mock-up sketch for another Pronto Plate print that sadly never made it onto the plate. Even though it didn’t see the light of day outside my sketchbook, I had great fun creating a new animal hybrid of flamingo and rooster!
11 X 17 inches
Lonely Dinosaur:
This was my first ever attempt at using a Pronto Plate for “stone-less” lithography. Personally, I HATED using these plates and they fought me every time I tried to pull a print, but I still got something out of the experience. I love goofy imagery, so drawing a T-Rex with baby legs and huge arms trying to get a hug was really fun! I also got to play around with cross-hatching which is my absolute FAVORITE way to draw.
11 X 17 inches
Hyenas:
This is another study of contour lines, although this drawing incorporates small areas of shading and the use of solid blacks. As an artist who loves capturing animals, I thought the challenge of depicting fur using only lines without going overboard would be perfect for this study, and, because hyenas have great (and terrifying) personalities, I thought they’d be fun to draw portraits of.
22 X 30 inches