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march2025

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This print series represents my abstracted sense of self over the past few months; it complements my larger piece, “Discovery”. The fine separations and destroyed parts of myself represent that I do not feel whole, parts of me are missing, and in ways, I feel empty. The poses I chose to photograph myself in serve a purpose. The action print represents that I may not be whole at the moment, but I never leave myself behind. I chose to photograph myself in blue jeans, which I have worn for a very long time. I wear the same two pairs every day, and I guarantee that if you see me around, I’ll be wearing one of them. The pose with my arms behind my back I shot nude to become more comfortable with my own body, in an attempt to steer away from self hatred and embrace myself for who I am and what I am entirely. I chose not use skin tones for that pose because I am still exploring the ideas of representing and associating people with colour, as seen in my previous work “HER”. Currently, I’m feeling lightly blue with sharp hits of deep red, but I never get away from grey. 

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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 you move 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 about how I wanted.

I will come back to this mesh count and use strictly spot colour methods, as it will only enhance the effect this mesh can achieve. 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 harbour my ink within your openings? I was using acrylic paint with Golden Screen Medium (expensive stuff!) and added a bit of retarder on 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, but still, I wasn’t fast enough.

The first edition of these prints is 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 won't happen, unless I get super super lucky.. no.. maybe.. no. Also, mixing skin actually sucks. I spent way too much time and 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 you're interested (linked above). Thank you, and live, laugh, love.