Heavy Metal and Disappointment

Hmm...How did I forget about this painting?

I don't seem to have any of it's earlier in progress photos...Which is sad, since it's been through a lot.

 This is it's current state. If you pay attention, you can see that I blotted out the right portion of the painting. I made a hasty decision the night before it's "official" due date to paint in a large building present in the original photo. Now, when I usually make revisions to paintings, I have to paint over bits of the entire painting, not just the thing I want to add. This time, I added the building without coordinating it with the rest of the composition. In accordance to the good judgement of my professor, I blotted it out. Additionally, this gave me an opportunity to adjust the subject matter of the painting. Since I'm already warping the perspective of the painting, the hazy and faded edges of the painting suggest a sort of dream sequence. Is this assemblage of toys harmless...or some sort of violent nightmare? WoooOooooOooo.....

Anyway, I've been hiding my printmaking work cause I'm kind of...embarrassed by it really. I definitely overestimated my actual experience with printmaking and underestimated the trickiness and delicacy of both solar emulsion and screen printing. Now that I finished the projects, I'm comfortable with the processes, but I'm definitely unsatisfied with what I handed into class.

For the screen project, we made both hand-generated prints and photo emulsion prints. For my hand-generated one, the text was supposed to say "One Way, Many Directions." Since I received one of the larger screens, I got a little over-excited and decided to use as MUCH of the screen as possible. When I got to the bottom, there wasn't any room to finish writing "Directions." At that point it was too late to wash out the screen blocker...so I just blocked the entire word out and left "Many." Which was silly, cause it would have looked fine without it.

 See? Much better. Next up was the photo emulsion, a way to achieve much greater precision.

 Except it was based off of this:

I'll just say that I need more screen printing practice. Which is why I chose plastic etching for my final project.

 Plate 1 of 5. Feels muuuuuch better. Even that body is happy about it.

I haven't shown much from my sculpture class since, well, there isn't much in my sculpture class. We just finished our third project, the first of which broke. Fortunately, I literally had a blast bending and melting metal to my will and I'm awfully pleased with the result. The class took a field trip to the local scrap yard to find materials for the project. I wound up bringing back the heaviest collection of metal out of anyone in the class to make this...clock...circle, chain, thing...Okay, more thought went into it than that: I'm just rather pleased and in awe over being able to throw this together without any prior experience with metal.

And so far it's still standing! In one week, art majors at F&M are having a photo shoot for all of our work, so I'll finally have professional photos for once. Yay! It's perfect timing, since now is the time for submitting portfolios and applying for jobs. Yay! (I mean boo, but really I mean yay). For once, all of you lovely readers will get to see my paintings for how they really look.