Saint Sebastian Double Ring

Here in Italy, I'm afraid I have become somewhat obsessed with the Catholic saints, and my favorite is Saint Sebastian, who's always depicted being shot by arrows (second favorite: Saint Peter of Verona, always depicted with a cleaver in his head. Ow!) I learned to make wax molds and cast recently, so I cast myself a Saint Sebastian double finger ring so I can kick ass Catholicism-style.













I'll post much more cast jewelry soon; I've been busy. For something much less dramatic than a giant ring of a dying saint, you can watch my critique of Kinder Egg toys I've found here in Italy.

EARGASM! Quick Print Update!

Here's a superquick print update...this is a woodblock print with a keyblock and a second block all jigsawed out so that I could ink the pieces individually and print all the colors in one go. EARGASM!



And here it is without the background, coming soon to a t-shirt near you!



Still having a blast in Italy...look out for more jewelry etc. soon!

Cortona Streets and Priests: Intaglio Prints!

Here are my first ever intaglio prints! These guys are etched into plates, inked up, and run through the press to produce awesome little prints. I have a long way to go before Intaglio Masterdom, but here's a start! This first one is two separate plates of a sketch I did of one of the alleyways here in Cortona, Italy.



This one is a three-plate print inspired by my recent trip to the Vatican:



And here's another version of it, a "ghost print" made by printing off of the key plate a second time:



Still having a great time in Italy...only a month left!

A Jewelry Mini-Post

Hello from Italy! Yes, I have been in Italy for nearly a month now, and will be here for over a month more. Here's something I just finished a few days ago, a Cerberus pendant made of copper and brass. The whole thing is maybe the size of a quarter and a dime pushed together:

Aaaand here's the back. I'm thinking I'll make it into a necklace, but as of now it's just a chunk o' metal:



If you're interested what I've been doing in Italy other than making things, you can follow my video blog starting with this video!

The Ugly Uncles: Cast Plaster Sculptures!

So here's what I've been doing for the last three weeks: casting a series of sculptures!









I had never done this before, but basically I made an original out of plasticine, covered it in rubber and plaster, cut it open strategically to form a mold, and then cast these guys in plaster with that mold. Here are some little maquettes I was doing in the planning stage:



I chose this guy:


And made him bigger! Such intense concentration...



Here he is almost done; just needs some smoothing out and his legs fixed a bit.



After he is cast, he becomes the four ugly uncles pictured above! Oh, and the four uncles have a fifth sibling. This fifth uncle was my test cast, and he didn't fit in well with the others. So I took him outside and left him in a gargoyley perch downtown for pedestrians to appreciate:



Whew! Oh, and as for what happens to the plasticine after the mold is made: it tends to come out pretty trashed. I combined my leftover plasticine with somebody else to make this abomination afterwards:



Think of that when you try to sleep tonight.

Less Art...More Ridiculous: Justin Bieber and Doctor Who

Hello everyone! Well, I don't have a real art update right now, but I figured I'd post these for fun. This first thing is a little animation I did about a week and a half ago about Justin Bieber; doing this kind of cheap slide-showy animation was really fun, and I'm going to try to make another one soon. Sorry Bieber fans:

I also made this Doctor Who shirt; I saw a girl a few weeks back wearing a shirt that said "The Dark Night" and had a pretty badly drawn Joker on it. I thought the shirt was hilarious and that she had made it herself, but in the end it was just a shirt for some sorority function. The idea stuck with me, and I decided to make a really painfully bad fan shirt for one of my favorite shows, Doctor Who!



It's a little embarrassing to wear due to the sheer badness of it all, but I do it anyway. So far, nobody has said anything about it, not even my creative spelling of "Doctor."

I have a show this Friday for some sculptures I'm going to cast in plaster, so look out for that this week; take care!

Art in Boxes and More Photography!

Well, it's been a sleepless couple of weeks, but here's a brand spankin' new post! These are some box installations that I've been working on. The first is called Subvultures! and it's these two connected boxes:

The boxes are about a foot and a half tall, and they are filled with stuff that I drew, then digitally colored and printed. There are people jumping from one box to the next; people from each box seem to want to get into the opposite box. If you're curious, the text above the box on the left is Japanese for "the most beautiful butterfly of all is found in the cocoon of your heart," and the text for the box on the right is Latin for "Ah, human cares! Ah, how much futility in the world!" This is one of those projects that I wish I had better pictures of, but here are some closeups nonetheless:

At some point I'll try to take better pictures; you can't see any detail in these, arg! Here's my second box project, which functions as kind of a small cabinet, I suppose:

When you open the clasp at the top of his head, it swings open to reveal what's inside:

Aaaaand finally, something that's nice and easy to translate into a digital format because it's flat! Here's some more 35mm photography (some of which has been painted on, bleached, had the negative scratched, etc.):













Thanks so much to models Lauren, Kathryn, Eric, and Ana! Well, now that all of that is over, look forward to about a solid month of rubber sculptures. Yes, really. Moldmaking and casting, I am pumped!