Illustration

Hand-scratched DJ names into undeveloped film with an awl, then scanned. Then collaged with J.’s film scans of Northern California botanicals.

From an illustraton I did of S. in tenshi

Process for block printing onto lino My first attempts at laser-cutting a linoleum block of an original illustration last year didn’t go well. However after a lot of time spent (and test paper wasted :0) I’ve found a few things that improved the print process over 4 iterations: Linoleum size and treatment I tested on earlier different versions but finally bought 9"x12" linoleum. It’s hard to find this pre-mounted but it’s important that it’s mounted to a block and flattened so that it doesn’t curl, for a few obvious reasons (the laser has a focus field of < a few mm, and printing also would suffer if it wasn’t flat). ...

Trying to have a smoother pipeline where I can print posters out before an event, since more and more people are asking me about them. W. printed out a single inkjet version for the door so people would at least know the lineup (this is the first event that we didn’t release the lineup on social media, so I wanted to have it somewhere at the event physically for people to refer to). ...

another hard one – eostre has felt like a struggle for me. even though we took last year off, i don’t feel a lot of joy in what i’m doing; mostly i want to support my gf. ppl gave me a few directions and i tried to go with those and it turned out those weren’t very clear concepts (even for those that suggested it). i reviewed past moodboards about birth and was inspired by a few midwife lithographs, which often had fanciful representations of the inside of the uterus, or sometimes just a dismbodied pelvis, and hands reaching into pull a fetus out, or sometimes a baby pushing its hand out through the vaginal aperture. ...

Played more with smart objects (making an ink bleed effect) for the side text here, as well as applying color as adjustment layers instead of adding them in the image. Also quantitatively measured contrast and adjusted to meet minimum WCAG guidelines.

tried a lighter format based on this illustration of j. and l.

a sketch of j. and l. at my home studio at the rope/technique lab i host very occasionally. i would like to start this up again with some regularly but need a co-organizer. it’s been hard to find the balance between intimacy within a regular group and enough people to fill out the space (at max we’ve had 15 people, at minimum just a couple) unless i make this a more public event rather than invite-only; i do want to make it more public, but am having a hard time figuring out how to manage the transition into what i would want to be a more formalized setting where i define ground rules for the space. ...

I’ve wanted to use lasercutting to help with the more tedious aspects of blockprinting for a long time. I finally had an opportunity to test this with an illustration that had received a lot of positive feedback and sufficient time before the event that I could plan on bringing prints beforehand. Laser setup I’m using L.’s laser which she has generously set up in the woodshop. Lightburn for the software. Settings are here: ...

Tasked with doing a flyer for Envelope’s “Samhain” event. We usually do a bit of visioning beforehand about concept, but no one had time or drive to do this. I looked at inspo of some heavy metal posters and was drawn to a heavy perspective shot of an elf in armor: in particular I thought the sword widening with the forced perspective was really striking, and this kind of forced perspective was a concept I wanted to practice. (Fwiw, the final result did not end up with the kind of exaggerated effect I was looking for, but since people liked the teaser so much and G. said that it probably wasn’t worth it to correct, I didn’t attempt to go back and do proper perspective.) ...