Okay, so the lunar new year (or, to be less inclusive, 'Chinese New Year'... sorry Korean friends) isn't until next week, but I anticipate busy-ness and not much blogging time-- classes start up in just 2 days-- so here's to striking preemptively & wishing you all a happy one.

It's the year of the rabbit.
So, a rabbit! 

In other news, I tried to do some test prints this weekend. 
It was... a re-learning experience. Set up and clean up was quite a hassle, as expected. After getting my giant sheet of Stonehenge paper ripped down into smaller sheets-- which was a project in itself-- I got my ink and brayer and glass sheet out:

Rolled out some ink, got out the linoleum block Colin carved, inked it, printed it. See below:

I present to you, the final print (which is upside down from when it was initially created-- but we decided that it was better upside down!). 
Personally, I like it. Colin thinks I'm just humoring him when I say that, but I like it. It's, like, non-representational anti-aesthetic pure form imagery that, like, challenges our ideas of negative versus positive space, maaan. 

Some other test prints done that day:

None of which are perfect, but it's okay. It's a learning process. I didn't do too many prints because after each inking, the lino blocks were getting a lot of ink buildup... The ones done later turned out better than the first few ones though. It's just a matter of getting the hang of how to apply enough ink to the brayer and how to roll it on the block to cover it evenly. That was the main problem with the whole process-- getting too much ink on some parts of the block (where carved details were lost) and not enough ink, if any, on other parts. 

I have lots more paper and ink left, so I'll try inking again another day & see if they come out better. In the meanwhile, I have more drawings to carve as well: 

Lots to keep me busy with. 
Happy (early) year of the hare, everybody! 

With having some extra time to spend indoors this last week on account of the snow (office was actually closed on Wednesday, even though the snow wasn't actually that terrible), there were attempts to be productive.


There was mostly napping. I admit this. 


But there were also attempts to be productive.

Took a stab at this toy bird.

Slabbed on an underpainting of color... leaving the rest of the work to be done another day (or two, or three).

Still haven't moved on to the bulk of the work on that yet, but have moved on and have finished carving the second giantcat & girl linocut this week:

It's going to be different from the original drawing due to mistakes in carving-- I had initially started cutting from the upper right corner, removing a large area in the background, before I realized that I needed to leave the entire background area uncarved/untouched so that it would be inked as black. Arg. Why is there no undo button?

I tried to play it off as a triangle of light coming from the flashlight now-- don't know how successful that'll be.

Ah well.

Also did the third drawing for this linocut series this week, which will be:

I had run out of linoleum though, but that was taken care of yesterday-- after spending the afternoon at the MoMA with Colin, we stopped to buy some art supplies before grabbing dinner (on Curry Hill, which is the start of my pseudo-goal to try every Indian restaurant on 6th street/Curry Hill to compare-- was torn between a couple of places, such as Brick Lane Curry House or Spice Cove, but last night was at Haveli and it was pretty good! Attentive service, good lassi, free mango ice cream for dessert- awesome).

And yay, more art supplies. More linoleum. AND also got some Rives BFK papers, which weren't easy to transport back home on the subway, but was managed somehow. So now I can do some test prints... especially since I also found/unintentially-dumpster-dived-and-acquired the missing element I needed to get this thing done.

Here is a ragecomic to illustrate my story of this glorious aquisition:  

I now have two large panes of glass that I can roll ink on. Aaaaaaaawwwwyeeeeaaaa.
See the glorious glass below:

Not very much was done today. Colin had a stack of his students' final exams to grade, which meant that Tommy had a stack of students' final exams to nap on. Proof:

So far, this year has kinda been off to a slow-ish start (though really, it’s only the 8th day in! So not many accomplished acts of productivity is a-okay). Today’s been a prime example of non-productivity, complete with sleeping in until 1PM and completely missing the morning.

Been following the story of the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords all day. Tragic event, paired with a lot of mind-numbingly depressing partisan bickering and bull. I realize that this in itself is quite partisan, but I just logged onto humanevents.com to see how the right is responding to the shooting, and the most recent reader comment in their article covering this news story is:

“She voted against Pelosi. There was a Republican Federal District Judge present who was the real target. Obama gets to put a Liberal District Judge who is Simpatico to the illegal Aliens in and send a message to his own not to cross him. This was a set up by the Obama Administration pure and simple. They will now spin this to make the Tea Party members and conservatives look like the bad guys; introduce new legislation to remove more of are freedoms. This to them is just another means to an end. The Liberal media will have a Hey day with this. They want the House back and will do anything to get it.”

Grammar aside—ugh. That was enough to make me stop reading further. Comments as extreme as that one make me hope that they must be satirical, but unfortunately I do know someone in real life (much to my extreme chagrin) who thinks the exact same way, and I can definitely imagine an identical-to-the-above sentiment coming out of his mouth.
It’s nothing but sad.
:
:

On a much more random tangent that has absolutely nothing to do with current events and politics whatsoever, the linoleum of my first cat&girl drawing is completely cut, and I'll think about printing some prints of it soon:

Actually making prints of this will be a messy process though. I have some printmaking ink (black) and a small brayer (acrylic, not rubber-- so I hope it works!). But I still need to get a sheet of glass or something to spread out and roll the ink on. Not to mention that I don't have any papers either to print on either. That'll require a trip out to the art supply store. 

I'm thinking of doing a series of linocuts of cat&girl. And giving them a proper name. I'm not opposed to cat&girl, but there's already the pretty-popular webcomic Cat and Girl out there. Then again, giving the "work" a name seems like I'm taking this series seriously as a "work", whereas I know that they're just pretty silly and not-art. Then again, I'd consider my whole recent body of work as not-art and embrace it as so.
It's okay, I like my comics and inks.

(everytime I think about what is art/what isn't art, I think of Lisa Turtle from Saved by the Bell and the quote, "What is art? Are we art? Is ART art?" Can't get any more low-brow than that. )

I was thinking about the girl and the cat on my train ride yesterday, and about possibly expanding them outside of linocuts since I do find them more potentially interesting than previous ideas... but I'm probably going to stick with the linocuts for the time being. The person-with-cat idea isn't particularly original, after all (aside from Cat and Girl, there's also Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes, among countless others that I'm currently forgetting, I'm sure).  

I'm growing fond of the girl and the cat though.

Here's the second linocut I'm currently working on:

The prints ::should:: (hopefully) look something like this, but mirror-imaged:

Also, Colin got me an easel for Christmas! I now FINALLY (at loooooong last) own an easel! I still have yet to put it to any use (shame), but will soon. He wins at gift-giving this year.

He's also currently digging his car out all by himself (insisted that I can stay indoors) so we can go catch a showing of "Black Swan" tonight. He's the best!