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Class Favourite Issue 04 (silk)

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Nov 8th, 2025 Store

Program 12 Class Favourite Silk Screen

Techniques Practiced:

Edition printing, perserverance, fitting as much as I possibly can onto one screen, cmyk (you know I really thought I had this one nailed), new paper types, consistency

Well this was fun. Sorry. Hello! Long time no talk to the maybe 2 people max who read this on a monthly basis. Life has been splendid, I haven’t been printing as much as I’d maybe like to, but hey, that's what life gives you, ups and downs, left and rights, think Mike Tyson vs Evander Holyfield. I’m Holyfield, boom boom boom step Tyson in the pocket goooooooodnight Irene. Enough! This is now the new direction for our magazine (Class Favourite Magazine). Monthly editions comprised of roughly 12 sheets of loose-leaf cardstock, all screenprinted by hand. It was a shit ton of work due to the two CMYK jobs present in the work, about 38 working hours and $240 spent. I was lucky enough to have my dearest Camille with me, primarily for morale boosting purposes; however, she will slowly become my apprentice, hopefully not like an Anakin Obi-Wan type of thing, but we’ll see. Trying to teach while printing is an experience I am thoroughly enjoying. This has undoubtedly been an enjoyable experience overall. I’m not really used to this type of printing anymore. When I first came to OCAD and eventually got access to the studios, I was doing this all the time, small format, good reg, consistent but straightforward printing. I lost touch with this slightly, moving quickly into very large format early on. I didn’t realize the unpracticed skill slipping in that time. While the fundamentals remain, it’s a pretty different process when printing at large format, especially on substrates like canvas, where you can’t really use traditional registration techniques. Although the workflow still isn’t entirely figured out, I’m excited to see where this project goes. Of course, I am happy I get to print all the time and still do somewhat the same project and I think it’s a really cool concept, just gotta see it take off a bit. Thanks.

Images:

This is a video... Click me.

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March 27th 2025 Store

Program 11 Self Portraits

Techniques Practiced:

High mesh counts (305 whattt), high DPI’s (95 whattttt), photographing myself, getting weird and personal in the photography sutdio, skin tones, spot colors, layering and transparency

These came out so awesome. Through this process I have learned that I absolutely love printing with a high mesh count. The details alone! ahh crazy ville. It allows me to blend these really subtle tones with super fine dither dots resulting in something that can be enjoyed from a distance and when moving closer you enter an entirely different piece. I did halftone these, which was partly me being lazy because I didn’t want to make 8 different skin tones for the same layer but it still turned out just about how I wanted it. I will come back to this mesh count and use strictly spot colour methods because it will only increase the effect this mesh can give. For those reading who are not print people, I will not explain halftoning as that’s a simple image search, but spot colour is a process where you take a preferably tonally (is that a word? idk) rich graphic and take each different shade of the same colour and mix an ink seperately for them, that way you work with vectorized graphics and can control the transparancy and other aspects of the print through your ink process, instead of letting the little dots create your gradients for you. It’s complex and with something like this it takes a lot of trial and error, which I will do, I just wanted to get something on paper and try out this screen. Shockingly, I only had one problem within this process, drying times. Oh my sweet sweet screen, why must you harbor my ink within your openings? I was using acrylic paint with golden screen medium (expensive stuff!) and added a bit of retarder off the top and holy shit, it’s like the ink dries as soon as it touches the screen. I felt I had embodied the flash when doing these prints, still, I wasn’t fast enough. The first edition of these prints are phenomenal, the tones, the colour, the blend ooo ahhh but as you go through the edition they quickly become less and less detailed (still very detailed lol) and the colour almost completely changes shade. I tried numerous things to help with this, more retarder, doing a clear pass (pulling ink then pulling again on a dry stencil) spraying the screen with water beforehand, but to no avail... there’s just one thing that worked at the very end... and that was patience. To achieve the look I was going for, I needed to sponge out the ink from the underside of the screen every print, which from a editioned point of view, that is completely and totally inefficient and would probably never happen. These past couple projects have taught me nothing more than to never expect perfection or complete accuracy on my first go, it just wont happen, unless I get super super lucky.. no.. maybe.. no. Also mixing skin actually sucks, I spent so long and way to much money trying to get proper skin tones but I think I’m just a complete novice at mixing inks, I’ll get better. Anyway, technicalities are fun and game and I love learning more... mark my words... I will become a master. I was looking through a lithograph book I was given and the title is “Romancing The Stone” by Frederick Hagan (shouddou OCAD) and I love that title, I romance the shit out of my screens. As always, there’s a more artisty write up on the store page with the prints if your interested (linked above) thank you and live laugh love.

Images:

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March 2nd 2025 Store

Program 10 Discovery

Techniques Practiced:

Large format, precision when working large, canvas technique, recovery (messing up and being like oh wait that kind of works too), stretching canvas like some sort of painter, being openly communicative

Out the gate, this piece means a lot to me. I wanna do a blah blah weird process blog posting like I usually do but I may get a little sentimental so bare with me. This piece attempts to illustrate the state of my mental throughout the last 3-4 months. I’ve been dealing with a form of loss and what came with that was great change in my life, change that is hard to talk about clearly so it’s difficult to convey what I’m feeling to others, but at the same time, it feels very real to me. It’s a battle between feeling very alone and wanting to retreat back to comfort while also wanting to explore these thoughts and indulge in the aching, explosive feeling that comes with loss.. stuck in the middle. Maybe that doesn’t make any sense and my writing is quite poor, but the purpose of the blog is to free write... sooo take it or leave it. The process of creation on this one gave me a slap in the face and a couple loonies. I documented everything quite well so if you would like to pause and look at the images nows your chance... I started by covering up an old painting of mine that I started to spit at everytime I walked past I just covered it with a quick layer of titan white and because the painting underneath was black it left this really nice texture, it was a product of doing something fast and half-assed but hey, nothin wrong with happy accidents, which this piece is full of. I then added a strip of ultramarine blue using tape because I wanted it to be blocky, and an orange circle. I liked the look of this, and it sat for around 2 months. Then shit went left, hard times, winter, no bike, restlessness etc... and I really needed to create and I wanted to go big, real big 48x48 canvas big, biggest screen in the shop big. So I stripped the canvas from the frame and threw it on the drying rack, it’s design time baby. This went through a lot of different iterations and trying stuff out but the great thing is about canvas is that you can cover up... ooooh what a luxury. I started with laying down this gorgeous granite texture that I took from one of my photographs from a distant summer in the mountains, I wanted it to be dark red and coarse, something that captures my thought process as it dips into abstraction while logic shatters. This was my first time using the mega swing arm but shockingly I got a good layer down for the most part but the screen moved pretty bad on my second pass so the right side looked horrific, I couldn’t stand it, I wanted to burn everything. But this simple shift of a screen opened the doors to something more, something I truly see myself in. I took a night to think about wether or not I should cover it up, woke up at 8 and went straight to the studio and layed down a thick titan white strip, covered up the smudging and was left with two white’s that didn’t match at all. Then I was like, oh my god, you know what only works well with a stark white backing, cmyk. I really wanted to photograph a couple because I’ve never done it before and I thought it would be an interesting experience to try and share vulnerability in a studio setting. I was lucky enough to get two great models (friends but not sure if they want to be named) and the process was just as interesting as I thought it would be, capturing a couple in poses you may only see behind closed doors is special experience. Ah, Im writing a lot time to wrap it. There will be more writing of what this piece actually means to me in the more refined “store” page. I can pretty confidently say this is probably my most intentional piece, everything from the distorted texture of the white to how my male model is leaning slightly to the right, back into the blue. Creating it was very strenous but entriely worth it, also just love getting back into large printing, big emotions require big visualizations, anyway, absolute blab fest on this one.

Images:

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February 5th 2025 Store

Program 9 Practice 1

Techniques Practiced:

Skin tone, spot colour, patience, having fun, being ok with whatever happens, just a poster.

I had lots of fun doing this one. For a while I’ve been thinking about how colours represent people. For example when I think of myself, I see process blue, I see a pale yellow, I see a deep cadmium red and I see payne’s grey. I wanted to put this idea down onto paper somehow, but I also wanted to make it more concrete something a little more... I don’t know.. literal I guess. I pretty much immediately thought of legs for some reason, not just any legs, nice legs. Long legs, legs that tell a story of some sort of past intimacy. Originally this was going to be a study on my good friend, I wanted to photograph her legs, put down the colours I think of when I see her face and do a small write up of why she’s so awesome. Almost like something you’d see in a magazine, like an ad for her. But it simply didn’t work out that way, couldn’t book studio time, schedules didn’t align.. blah blah blah. I still wanted to roll with the idea so I did, it’s just a little less personal. The legs are printed with a 6 to 1 ink/base cmyk ratio which turned out to be primo rimo. It surprised me a bit cause I was cautioned by others in the studio that cmyk doesn’t do skin tones that accruately but I would say it turned out pretty damn accurate. The other parts of this “poster” are pretty straightforward and don’t really need explaining. I definitely want to continue this idea in the future so we’ll see what comes out of my brain. This is simply design practice, but boy did it prepare me for the next thing.

Images:

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December 11th 2024 Store

Program 8 Alternate Substrates

Techniques Practiced:

Metal work, expectations, feeling comfortable with knowing nothing about what you’re doing, acceptance, dodging moire, registration with very transparent inks

Well this was exciting. I’ve always wanted to try printing on different substrates, Fabric, bingo, paper, bingo, metal, kind of bingo. Although this print is very simple, a one colour halftone which I hope to god you are all familiar with by now (if your not.... look it up!) the metal brought it’s own set of problems. Sourcing the metal was easy (thank you blessed OCAD for your honourable services) and cutting it down to size was even easier! I chose this piece of sheet metal specifically because one, it’s hot rolled, which gives the discoloration throughout the piece and it has tons of character, with the random splotches and staining it was love at first sight. After cutting my pieces to size I started with degreasing and filing the edges down to highlight them and also make them printable (sharp edges tear screens... remember that in all walks of life) then whamo I had a printable plate. The metal prep part was easier than I thought it would be, the metal shop was slightly intimidating but all is well. Little did I know.... the metal was the easier part (que welcome to the jungle). The screen process was kind of a nightmare. The initial idea was to take the unique found shapes on the metal plates and lightly change the hue with a super transparent layer of ink to add some colour in. This didn’t work at all (see image) because I didn’t fully capture how ink reacts with metal. Ink just fully sits on top of metal because it’s not pourous (ohhhhh!) Because of this, I couldn’t get the ink opaque enough to do anything to the hue without potentially interfering with the halftoned image. However, this is ok because I absolutely love how they turned out anyways. The halftoned image gave me a terrible moire at first, and for those who don’t know what that is it’s when the frequency of the halftone dot matches the frequency of the mesh on the screen, giving a really weird and quite ugly pattern throughout the image so I ended up having to reburn my screen. The absolute worst part of this process was aligning the image to the plate, because the ink was so transparent it was very hard to align it with acetate. Also with metal being metal, it was uneven so it was shifting my print everytime, anyway the point is is that registering this print was hard work when I didn’t think it would be, judging by how this is one of my most simple prints to date. Enough yapping, I love how this print turned out for many reasons, it aligned with my vision almost perfectly which never happens and will absolutely be printing on more uniqe substrates in the future. Side note - these will eventually be hung off 1/2 inch brackets so they sit away from the wall, giving a floating effect which I think will look excellent.

Images:

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November 12th 2024 Store

Program 7 Refined large format

Techniques Practiced:

Color plans, Large format registration, Mental endurance, Acrylic paint-Screen medium threshold, Acrylic paint finishes, Speed printing, Salvaging dried ink in stencil.

Well well well, back to large format. Not as large as the canvases but still large enough to question my place on this earth. As I always do, I’ll go into the problems and lessons learned with this print first. The large format film printer is broken, which for those of you who dont know, film is a critical part of the screen process, it is I create my stencils with. Anway so yea, had to go through copy and print services which was a slight nightmare, I had to use a paper stock called transparent bond (NOT TRANSPARENT). Ruined a couple screens at first but then buddy got the exposure times dialed. Everything about this print was extremely costly, spending at least $100 on paper ALONE and don’t even get me started on the cost of doing 3 different color ways with acrylic paints. It seems whenever I do a print project I act as though money grows on trees, how irresponsible of me.... Other than the time constraints (god bless ocad studios but I am in desperate need of a 24/7 studio), the dolla bills and the stencil problems I loved doing this print again. 22x30 gotta be my favourite size to print at, it’s large enough to see fine detail clearly and give different perspective depending on distance looked at, but small enough that it’s accesbile for most to slap on a wall. This is a repeated stencil from my first large format attempt (further down blog) but I felt it was necessary to give this print some more attention. I changed a few things up by layering the stencils differently and making it an overall more maximalist print, also giving me further insight into what this project really means to me. Printing at this size gave me the oppurtunity to refine it and register it perfectly to how it originally should have looked on the canvas, but you know me, I love when prints get messed up. It shows they were done by hand and worked through, something you could never achieve with a digital print. Last thing, if you ever print large flats of color like I had to for the base layer, may god be with you.

Images:

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October 22nd 2024 Store

Program 7 High layer count

Techniques Practiced:

Swearing, Proper registration techniques in print, Pre-press registration techniques, Accepting that my prints will never look like my original plan, Becoming adaptive to issues, Development of a callus on my finger from mixing ink (so, so much mixing), Eyeballing jar to print color.

This print kicked my ass. When I first got the assignment, I was like psshhh I got this in the bag. Already got my idea! Little did I know, I was standing at the gates of hell. It went smoothly at first, singing and whistling as I passed my first layer and as I went on to the next, I realized something critical that would play a part in this whole printing process, information loss! Yes! We all love information loss, especially when it’s a crucial part of our work. This issue is seen all over the print (I won’t tell where (blushing emoji)) but this problem cursed my print. This along with my newcoming to being really thorough about the tones and opacity of my inks dragged the time spent on and on. I’m being super negative, but I would rather be doing nothing else than this. 11 Layers was a lot to manage especially with the fine detailed nature of my image but it was indeed something I needed to do to learn from my mistakes and be able to work consistently with high layer editions in the future. That being said, I didn’t really like working with a pretty high layer count so I don’t really see myself working with it much in the near future unless a project requires I do so.

Images:

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June 25th 2024 Store

Program 6 Inspiration Print

Techniques Practiced:

Printing white underbase when forgetting to carve out background, Mixing and layering transparent inks (sweating), photoshop levels when trying to achieve a greater tonal range in halftones.

When this project was first proposed I let out a deep sigh, the brief being, “what inspires you to make art”. I really dislike these types of questions because I can never give someone a straight answer. As an artist, maybe I should respond with something like, “the interconnected relationship between man and the machine”, or “the infinite exploration of oneself in pursuit of happinnes”. But it usually just comes out as, “mhmmm i’m not sure, maybe people”. I think it’s really hard to pin point what inspires me because most of my artistic process is me just trying to capture something I saw in a flash before it dissapates which I assume is an accumulation of symbols and thoughts that I’ve gathered over whatever period of time. This project should be a series, which I may do in the future but this print alone simply does not do the question justice. Although I am hating on the the brief pretty hard I do think I have gained some clarity through doing this print and think its aesthetically beutiful, I worked hard on it. Anyways, I have written descriptions in the store page of each asset in the print which all contribute to my “inspirations” when it comes to art, take a look if you’d like.

Images:

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June 2nd 2024 Store

Program 5 Another Alpine Print

Skills Learned And Realizations Had:

Mixing ink from base and pigment, trying to shove as my films onto the screen does NOT save time, it’s a nightmare.

I’ve wanted to do this print for a very long time. The photograph printed is a film photograph taken in 2019 on top of Decker Mountain in the spearhead range. For those unfamiliar the spearhead range is behind the famous Whistler ski resort, which now costs an arm and a leg for a lift ticket... vail am I right. The prep time on this was disgusting as it was my first time using pins and tabs for registration and mixing ink from scratch with base, retarder and pigment. The ratio used allowed me to acheive what I like to call “dreamy” ink and lower the saturation of the image is 7:1 base to pigment, it really allowed the colours to blend well, but of course I burned the stencils too close together and too close to the edge of the screen so I had some pretty serious technical difficulties when it came to registration and dot gain. Luckily for me, the print was easy enough to line up with pins and tabs and due to the fact it is a rectangle. The title of this piece is i think i’m dreaming. I’d like to attempt this again at some point due to the dot gain issue but overall I like the abstract look in some of the prints. Yay! I love cmyk.

Images:

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May 20th 2024 Store

Program 4 Hand Drawn Stencils

Most relevant sentence:

Man, you really can do it anywhere!

This was a fun one, simple layout and drawings but the final piece speaks to me. I had trouble coming figuring out what to do with this project which is quite unlike me, I usually have a pretty strong idea instantly when given a prompt to work with. This was a valuable experience because I’ve never worked with different film techniques other than inket film. The frosted mylar with china marker gave a fantastic crayon like texture for the “power surges” as I like to call them. Another thing, this project further proves that you really can screen print anywhere, don’t got a printer? Use literally anything slightly transparent and a dark marker.

Images:

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April 6 2024 Store

Program 2 CMYK

Phrases Used Most:

Why is this unplugged, How do I, Why isn’t this coming through, Where did the marks go, This is harder than I thought, This black is way too black

My first attempt at cmyk printing made me question myself, my self worth and wether life is worth living, until those damn colours lined up. At first I thought embodying an inkjet printer would work, but it turns out shapeshifting comes with tricky consequences, especially when using jaquard process inks, they always get jammed up down there. In all seriousness, this print means a lot to me as it brings me back home everytime I look at it. The three photos used are all film photographs (more info on store page) super cool to see film photo to screen output.

Images:

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February 2 2024 Store

Program 1 Large Screens

Words Spoken Most:
Damn, How, Why, Ok?, Wait, Rushed, Gorgeous, Shit, Film, Can, Can’t

To describe is to attempt — This was an incredible experience, I would consider myself to be rich in knowledge when it comes to screen printing, but I learned so much more creating a print at this size. It gave me the opportunity to experiment with different inks and acrylic paints, registration techniques, and how to stay hyper focused for hours at a time while your trying to keep a 40x50 screen wet but not TOO wet throughout 4 ink changes on a single screen with print flash print techniques. I had some serious battles with this beast of a screen. This is not only my first ever large scale screen, but also my first multi layered print on canvas AND first time ever working with acetate for registration, (lol) I think I managed well given my experience with this form of print.

Images:

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December 16 2023

Program 3 Myself, For momanddad

Emotions Recorded:

Money, Anxiety, Doubt, Standing on tons of cash, Trying to hula hoop but not quite getting the rythm, headphones while others stare, the realization that painters tape is pretty expensive when used incorrectly, clear paper

A schematic is a shield against the violence of the variable.

Loved doing this piece, everything went pretty smoothly except for the red underpainting, wasn’t really sure what to do with it at first but after the print and paper was thrown on there I feel it really came together. This is supposed to be a representation of who I was at the time of making this piece and the duality of myself between mind and body. This is also the first piece of my current series, “Not To Be Framed”.

Images:

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December 16 2023

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Class Favourite Issue 04 (silk)

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