Each week will have a theme or a question that relates to the course content.
Every student will contribute one blog post per week, due by 11:59 pm on the Monday night before class.

Your posts should include images, a short text, and your name.

Friday, April 6, 2012

Relief Print

 These two works are both Relief Prints. They were made by carving a picture into a block of wood, seen in the top picture, and then rolling ink over the wood, seen in the bottom picture. this causes the ink to stay on the raised parts of the drawing creating a texture you can see and feel.


-Molly

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Printmaking

This woodcut print is called "Lucas" by the famous artist Chuck Close. Close is notorious for his amazing printmaking and realistic portraits. The process of making a woodcut is very difficult and time consuming. First, Close had to draw his image on a block of wood. Next, he or she must gouge out the parts of the wood that they do not want to be printed. Then the image is pressed on paper to transfer the ink and complete to piece.

-Melissa Mastrorilli

The Great Wave.

This piece, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, or most commonly known as just "The Great Wave" by famous japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, is made by a color woodblock print. This piece is very famously known for its very intricate detailing for it being a woodprint, which is very difficult to do considering the wood's hard and tough texture. Yet, Hokusai was able to create atmospheric perspective by creating what seems to be Mt. Fuji in the background, and also implied space by making the boats seem distant.

-Alfonso Robles

Ballpoint pen...

This drawing shown here is a piece by Juan Francisco Casas created using only a blue ballpoint pen. Pen ink in art is considered to be a liquid media. Although it could be perceived as a photograph, if you look closely you can see the massive amounts of cross-hatching used to create the negative space in the picture. The pen ink is also used for shadowing on the photographer's body to create the illusion of implied light as well.

-Alfonso Robles

Conceptual Art - Sunken Car

This is a work of conceptual art by well-known artist Ivain Puig. Now since in conceptual art, the idea is more important than the actual form of the piece, this work is giving off the idea that a car is sinking. The floor has a gloss finish to give the impression that it is a body of liquid instead, which could also be implied texture. Also, the way that the objects of the car are cut and placed on the floor also gives off the idea that the car is in a sinking state.

-Alfonso Robles

lithography

This artwork is titled "Home".  It is a print using the lithography method.  This form of printing is done on a flat surface.  The mage is drawn on a stone, it is then treated with an acid and the image is then put into the printer.  Lithography means that the ink is not on or below the surface and has no engraving.  The image id drawn on the stone with a grease-based crayon or ink.  Each color in the piece are done with different stones.  This form of printing became popular in the 19th century

--Dana-Lynn

Engraving- Alice

 This is an engraving of the famous book Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll.  The artist is Sir John Tenniel and back in the 1890's this type of printmaking was very popular.  Throughout the original edition of this book, are these type fun scenes chronicling fantastic events.  Engraving is done by carving deep lines into a metal plate. Then soakig the plate in ink and wiping off the excess from the shallower surface.  What is left is the ink in the deep surface and then the plate is run through a printing press and usually printed onto paper.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

John Edward Borein Monotype

The monotype of this cowboy is an excellent as example of this type of print.  Borein uses a variety of colors that run through the work to create the landscape that is intended.  Also seen is the way that some of the green landscape became more yellow than green after being run through the press.  The cowboy's clothes are also several different shades of blue.  Overall, Borein gives us a scene that is perfect for this style of prints.

M Rizzi

Linoleum Print

This is an example of a linoleum print. Linoleum print is when a soft material is carved so that the ink has somewhere to seep into to and then pressed onto a paper. This specific linoleum piece shows the depth at which the carvings were made. The darker portions of this print means that the carvings were deeper than that of the lighter portions where the carvings were shallow. The entire piece shows very fine detail and is a great example of a type of print making done.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Print: Woodcut


This woodcut, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, is extremely intricately done.  There looks to be hatching strokes and the use of line to create shadowing and different values of light and dark.  The print also “follows” many of the other principals and elements of art.  For example, the rule of odds, there are three animals to create a natural looking scene.  There is an intricate use of organic shape that creates the trees, sky, and ground of the print.  The artist also creates space in this print.

Printmaking

This piece is called "Relativity" by M.C. Escher. It was made using the process Lithography. Unlike, relief and intaglio, lithography is a print made by drawing onto a stone with oils, which pick up the ink. It is sometimes called a planographic process because the ink is not above or below the surface, but on the surface itself. It is one of the harder methods of printing, but the results are worth it. This piece plays with the idea of space because there are lots of stairs and doorways. They also appear in odd directions that plays with the viewer's eyes. There is also a lot of value in this piece because you can see that some areas are darker than others. Lastly, the piece may be named "Relativity" because relative to where you look, you notice something else.

- John Marchetti





Printmaking

Ronau Woiceske was an artist who continuously used all types of printmaking to make art. While he was talented in multiple areas, this piece was done with engraving and aquatint. Just as we discussed in class, aquatint allows for values and shades rather than multiple black lines. In this piece, called "Silver Light", the shadows make the viewer perceive depth and space. Also, the further back the objects, the more blurry they become. Such detail like this is usually difficult in printmaking. I also noticed that the piece was one of just 45 editions.

--Alexis Swoyer

This is a two plate mixed media etching by Glulla Zaniol. This is an image of the parliament building in London. I think this is a very unique iece because it has many different aspects to it. The buildings and the objects in the foreground like the railing, bench and the angel, all seem to lack or have dim colors. The sky water and the ground on the other hand are very colorful and bright. It seems like the color was added over the etching of the lines of the etching that make up the picture.

The intaglio art piece called Butterfly, was created by Ambera Wellmann. The viewer can tell the artist used intaglio because if you look closely, you can see where there is more depth in the picture. The artist must have dug deeper towards the bottom of the art piece because the wings become very dark, and you can tell the places the artist did not dig at all because the parts are still white/cream colored. You can tell this was done by hand because the lines are not perfectly straight and it looks like a human created it and not a machine.
-Rose Migliara

Woodcut Print

This is a woodcut print done by artist Tom Killion and is part of his series called "The High Sierra Series".  I chose this particular piece because it portrays a very beautiful view and has a lot of detail in it.  The trees and mountains in this piece are made with a lot of attention to detail which makes the piece even more impressive because those details were not drawn directly onto the canvas but were carved into a block of wood and then printed.  The artist uses line in the piece to help direct the viewers eye from the mountains in the front left to the skyline in the back right.  The tops of the mountains are a good example of the lines used because they are what make the piece flow from left to right.  The color scheme in this piece is made up of primarily different shades and tints of blue with black for the mountains and trees and a light yellow for part of the sky.  The use of different shades and tints of the same color helps create unity throughout the piece.

Conceptual Art

This is conceptual art based on the idea of natural selection, it is totally letting ones imagination run free though. The piece has no clear idea of natural selection, its just depicting "something" The piece does not need to have detailed skills, but this one definitely does. Conceptual art also does not need to show the whole explanation of whats going on, but rather just an idea.

Monday, April 2, 2012

PostSecret

 These two pieces are part of the PostSecret project. It’s a collection of over 1,000 postcards to Frank Warren. He had left postcards around places asking people to mail them in to him. The people are allowed to express any feeling, secret, etc with their postcard anonymously. There are literally hundreds of the postcards that I like but I only chose two so that everyone could get the idea of the art project. Everyday people who could be anyone on the street uses whatever means they want to express their secret. I first discover PostSecret in my early teens and marveled at how courageous people were to express their deepest darkest secret to the world.  To me, this is art in one of the purest forms because it is real. It’s about real people and those people expressing things that they normally couldn’t.
-Tara