Letterpress and Litho Prints!

Hello there! After an unfortunate camera-fixing-related hiatus, here are a few litho prints I've done recently. This one's done with a pronto plate:



And this one's a plate:



And here's a small little letterpress flier I printed with hand-set wood type. These projects were kind of made to learn about lithography and letterpress processes, so look out for more interesting and complex things later!

More Cast Jewelry! Rhino Ring, Obelisk Ring, and Bronze Medals!

Well, here it is: the promised post about the other things I've been casting here in Italy! The first is a rhino ring that I loosely based on the Albrecht Durer rhinoceros print:









This one's an obelisk (which are everywhere in Italy) with my initials in Egyptian hieroglyphs going around it:







And finally, if you remember a looong long time ago I made this print of me battling an octopus. I thought it was about time I got some accolades for that feat, so I made myself these bronze military medals:





Less than a week left in Italy!

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.