Anyways, I was on a mad litho printing run for the rest of July and into the first week of August. I was listening to a lot of Ghost (prepping for the concert on Aug 10!) and had a bit of a theme developing:

RIP Ozzy. If I recall correctly (and that is a big IF!) the plates for these prints were all done with india ink and heat set.

I tried printing a couple plates that I ran through my laser printer instead of drawing directly on the plate. The plates looked good, but I had some trouble getting nice prints from them. I’ll have to try this method again to see if I can get better results.

On Aug 7th my oldest and dearest friend Erik came out from Detroit for his annual visit, and we planned a trip within a trip and did a speed run to San Diego for Erin’s first concert!

The plate on the left was drawn with the India Ink. I used the dip pen to outline the feather and then a brush to paint on the ink. The plate on the right was drawing with the Pentel brush pen.

I started by printing the brush pen falling feather plate first. It took many prints on newsprint to build up ink on the plate, but I managed an okay print.

The first test print of the India ink feather grabbed all the ink!

I switched to the good paper and then made 4 prints. After the first print which is obviously over-inked, I switched brayers, laid down less ink and stopped running the plated back through the press a second time and got better prints.

So, the brush pen and the Dr Martin’s India ink and both viable options for making plates. I’m really excited that the lines made with the dip pen showed up. I don’t really like drawing with Sharpies, but I love love love drawing with ink. I think I might just stick with the India ink for awhile while I work on getting the inking and printing of the plates dialed in.

*Pronto Plate Lithography. Please don’t make me type that out every time.

** I should get a 2nd pen just to keep an almost empty cartridge in because that makes some amazing dry brush textures. I also didn’t know that they had gray and sepia cartridges. Want! I’ll pick up another one the next time I go to Blick Art Supplies.

On the first plate I used the Ultra Fine Point Sharpie to make my drawing. I then grabbed the standard Fine Point Sharpie and went over the dark areas and some of the lines.

As you can see, the lines drawn with the Ultra Fine Sharpie didn’t pick up any ink. I wasn’t surprised as I think that I had the same issue on one of my earlier plates. So after a couple attempts on newsprint, I set that plate aside as I didn’t think it was going to get any better.

The second plate was drawn with the Zig calligraphy marker. I used both ends and then went in the china marker to shade some areas:

For the third plate I only used the china marker:

Yeah, that works.

In fact, the china marker works almost too well. That plate picked up a lot of ink!

So what did we learn? Toss the Sharpie Ultra Fine back in the drawer. There is no need to heat-set a regular Sharpie, the Zig marker, or the china maker drawing. And the china marker drawings need fewer passes of the charged brayer. Those babies are gonna take a while to dry.

Next up – brush pens and india ink. And I’m still trying to find a ballpoint pen that works.

Well, he has finally found his true love and is getting married next weekend! I can’t think of any princess jokes that would apply. Maybe something about if the shoe fits… I don’t know. They met at the dog park … ??

Yeah, there is no good place to go with that so I’ll just leave the bad jokes to him and just carry on being so damn happy for them.

I’m thinking about that joke today because of this:

A rack full of drying prints that I’ve made this week! 12 that I made just this morning. Erin has forbidden me from singing Pharrell Williams’ “Happy”, but I am. Happy happy happy.

I’ve recently switched things up (who’s surprised?) and have started making collagraphs. When I made collagraphs in the past, I had built up the surfaces on the base and rolled the ink with a brayer and printed the plates as relief prints. Now I am cutting into the matboards and intaglio-inking into the recesses. I seem to have found my peace with the tarlatans and wiping plates. Who knows, maybe there are etchings in my future?

And then there are the lithographs. After the Pronto Plate Lithography workshop I took last month, I immediately ordered all the things I would need to do this process at home. After testing several different pens, markers, and ink, it seems the china marker is giving me the best results so far:

::insert happy dance here::

I’ll keep experimenting. I know there is a pen/marker that will give me the thin lines I want. I also need to get some toner powder. And for the pronto plate-curious, I am heat setting my plates in the oven for 3 mins at 250 degrees.

Hit me up if you’ve got questions or advice! I am wingin’ it here.

Erin and I both have pieces in the annual Membership Medley at Blue Line Arts in Roseville.

My piece is a monotype “Damaged” that I made last fall during my gell plate printing phase. And Erin’s piece is the first portrait that she painted! She kicks ass as I’m sure I’ve said before.

The 3rd Saturday Reception is July 19th from 5-7pm

The second show I am in is The Art of Printmaking at The MACC. This show is really exciting for me as it was juried and my first lithograph was accepted!

The reception was last weekend, but the show is up until July 26th and I can’ recommend it enough. So much great work – and all printmaking! ::swoon::

Get out there and check out all the shows!

Hot and cold baby. Hot and cold.

I blame my failed t-shirt empire. Thanks a lot TeePublic.

I was happily learning the “beyond the basics” of Illustrator and Photoshop by watching a bunch of tutorials – ask the neighbors how loudly I screamed when I discovered the “Remove Background” button in the Quick Actions of Photoshop! This ain’t your grandfather’s CS4! Somewhere in the midst of all of that I made a logo for Ink & Bone Alchemy and thought “Hey, this would be a cool t-shirt!”

And since some of my current favorite tees are from TeePublic, I took that little lightbulb and ran with it. I created a shop, uploaded the graphic and ordered a tshirt and a sticker. Sweet. Then I took the new abbreviated shop name, inknbone, and grabbed the domain name and made a new email address to use (my name is sooo many letters, ugh so much typing). Then I changed the tag line on the logo with the plans to sell them in my new TeePublic shop. I had big plans, I was going to “make the t-shirts you want to wear in the world”! I logged back into TeePublic. And so that I wouldn’t have to start a new listing from scratch, I copied the original t-shirt listing and switched out the graphic and updated the entry title and some of the tags and hit save. Then TeePublic coughed up a lung and played dead. Okay, I’ll deal with it in the morning. Well, come the morning and I had an email in my inbox informing me that my TeePublic account has been deleted for a “violation of Terms and Conditions”. What the actual fuck?!

On the bright side, they did process my order and now I have a nice one of a kind t-shirt and sticker. And I have found another provider to make stuff that I can sell myself on that new-fangled website I built, when and if the mood ever strikes again. Who knows, that was a month ago. I’m kinda in this weird bardo state – the sewing machine is out, but I haven’t felt like making new bags even though all the pieces are cut and ready. I pulled the ink and brayers out to do some printmaking, but that didn’t really go anywhere. I need to cut a couple mats for some prints I bought, but ugh, I would need to move the sewing stuff to do that. So yeah…

I did decide to do another Inktober run – a drawing a day for a month – this time using prompts from Retro Supply Co. I probably should get on today’s drawing. I wasn’t planning on writing a blog post today (I’m not even sure what prompted me to go to my site) and I’m really not sure why I suddenly started in on this whole t-shirt saga, I mean, I shot a gun yesterday and I didn’t write about that?!

And then this morning when I thought all was well except a few more design tweaks, I found that I couldn’t upload images to WordPress! Oh that is not okay! So, I hit the google. And I tried all the things. Nothing worked. And I tried some more things. And then I totally broke the site.

::very external screaming::

So, knowing my poor blood pressure was going to hit unhealthier levels than normal (I’ll tell you about my blood pressure woes later), I reminded myself that I have backups. Lots and lots of backups (this ain’t my first website rodeo). So, I hopped back into the FTP client and deleted the whole shebang and then re-uploaded yesterday’s subdomain folder that I had downloaded before I moved it and ta-da! Everything is working and I can upload images and at some point I might even start breathing again. fuck. Don’t tell my doctor about any of this. Or any English teachers who would be appalled at my infatuation with run on sentences. I save all my punctuation for .php files.

Now, I just need to figure out how to hide the sidebar on the shop pages and make the portfolio page full width – it really shouldn’t be this difficult! And after I give up on that because I spent most of yesterday trying to crack that nut, I need to create a bunch of product pages because Big Cartel doesn’t have an export products function because of course they don’t. So…. yeah. Big fun happening over here.

But my birthday is Friday and we are going to Santa Cruz so cake and cooler weather. I’ll take it.

So, the Adobe Bullshit ^TM really is all its cracked up to be – how annoying! Everything I have been struggling to do for years with outdated programs, apps, and work arounds is now so stupidly simple to accomplish. If I wasn’t so giddy I might be really pissed off. Surrender and be happy? That doesn’t sound right at all.

But here we are 3 weeks later, and a new website has been built in Adobe Portfolio*, Squarespace cancelled, and I spend my days working happily in Photoshop and Illustrator learning all the ins and outs and shortcuts that get shit done. Stupid programs that work.

*the biggest stumbling block in creating the new website was the eternal problem of how to organize the galleries. UGH! Still not happy with it.

I started watching some Skillshare classes again last month, and that has reignited my creative mojo – thank the Maker! It feels so good to be creating again after almost a full year of making no art at all. Covid and all that goes with it has definitely done a number on me. So I’ve been making illustrations on my computer in Affinity Designer and Photo because fuck you Adobe and your damn subscriptions! and that has been fun.

But then I hit some Affinity snags while making this piece-

Affinity Designer has no Offset Path. Why??! And then yesterday I wanted to create a half tone and all hell broke loose! You can’t seem to make a gradient half tone without unwanted artifacts on the edges! The solutions offered in the forums were just crap Band-Aids to the bigger problem. I was already annoyed with having to constantly adapt the simple Photoshop or Illustrator steps to work in the Affinity programs and apparently yesterday broke me.

I went to the Adobe website.

Now I have been mad at Adobe since they started this whole subscription game. Just let me buy your damn program and be done with it until I want to upgrade! I’ve limped along with my precious Lightroom3 and who knows how old a version of Photoshop that I had on my old computer for years now. And when I couldn’t get Photoshop to work on my new machine, I downloaded GIMP and then searched out new alternatives. I wasn’t going to get sucked into the Adobe machine!!! Yet here I am today, seething as I hoist the white flag and don the shackles of a Creative Cloud subscription.

::thedeepestofsighs::

So how does all of yesterday’s ragey-foot-stomping-temper-tantrum-I-hate-Adobe!-drama bring me to the zombie blog today?? Well, apparently Adobe Portfolio (it claims to make pretty portfolio websites) is included with any CC subscription, and my annual Squarespace fee is due in a couple days. Why pay for additional (and expensive) website hosting on top of the Adobe Bullshit (Bullshit is much easier to type than Creative Cloud Subscription and soothes me so that is how we will refer to it going forward thank you very much). Let’s try to save a couple hundred bucks a year right?! Well that sounds good on paper, I don’t use Squarespace’s store features as I have a Big Cartel account so no problem loosing that, but Portfolio doesn’t have blog capabilities. Okay, since I was already down the rabbit hole, I exported all the blog posts from my Squarespace website and imported them into my old WordPress elfini blog. Ta-da! Now all the posts are together again and I can just add a nice link to the blog in the nav menu of a new Adobe Portfolio website and Bob’s your uncle and all that jazz. But that of course called for a blog refresh – removing old outdated widgets and installing a nice new theme – and apparently this morning I have a lot to say about all of this! So here we are. I’m bringing blogging back.

And we all know that writing a blog post is my favorite form of procrastination. When I finish here, I have to actual hit that purchase button for the Adobe Bullshit and then build a new website so I can let the Squarespace subscription go before it renews in 3 days. I just wanted to create a damn halftone. My brain sucks.

My last post was a little over a year ago. The end of May with lots of fun things to look forward to in June 2019. I have fuzzy memories of a big down time after my solo show, but then what? I’m sure there were lots of things that happened during the 2nd half of 2019, but damn if I can remember any of them. I can’t recall much of anything from before the complete clusterfuck that has been the last 3 months. Maybe clusterfuck is the wrong word. Maybe not.

The beginning of 2020 started out fine – joined a gym and was doing yoga again. We went to San Diego for a long weekend in February. We had plans for a few more trips this year already booked. Then March hit and things started to go sideways. Coronavirus hit the news. March 16th the schools were closed. Then everything was closed. Months of sheltering in place. Then George Floyd was murdered. holy fuck. Throw some rioting and looting into the protests and a lot of bad decision making from the top and here we are. The world is on fire and rightly so. I’m reading, listening, learning how I can do better. Trying to stay in the moment, but also not.

I’ve watched myself pushing things away, distracting myself, trying not to be overwhelmed by it all. Because there have been days…

So I’ve been moving from one brain-distracting project to the next. The first couple weeks after the schools closed, we were on top of things. Erin and I were painting, going for walks and doing her PE assignments together. Trying to keep things “normal”, but normal was gone. In April I found my birth father (he died just last year) and then spent weeks learning everything I could and building a huge new family tree! A most excellent distraction. Then we started working in the yard again and my plant obsession kicked up a gear. A potting bench was ordered and I started thinking about gardens. But first a week focused on putting together a gallery wall in the foyer (ha! sounds so snooty). Then after much planning, Chris built me an elevated garden bed and voilà! I have a garden growing outside my studio window. And a morning dove is sitting on her nest in the tree next to it. I now spend my mornings outside watering and walking around the yard – a much nicer way to start the day than hopping on the computer first thing to read about the latest horror. Although today the Supreme Court ruled that federal anti-discrimination laws protect gay and transgender employees – “Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination “because of sex,” includes LGBTQ employees.” and that is some much needed good news in all this madness.

So, now what? I’ve started making art again and am going to start listing prints for sale. That outta keep me busy for a few days. Not sure when I’ll pick up an actual paintbrush, but at some point all my little defenses are gonna break and I’ll have to crank up the volume and throw some paint around. I can’t wait to see what comes of that! #haveshinkonspeeddial