Also, clearly I have lied about keeping these posts short and readable. Whoops.
Right now I'm almost finished with the lithography element of the project. I've done lithographic editions of the elderly women (nine so far--but I'll be adding another three or four to the project in January) after which I will try to learn screen-printing in like ONE DAY and print their costumes (on separate pieces of paper to be either collaged or chine colled in some manner or the other).
Of course I should be doing the research for an essay right now instead of posting. But I figure that since this project is school-related, it's not too horrible of a distraction. Right? Fack, I'm totally the cause of all my own stress...
Here we go:
This is one of the litho presses we use at school. I totally own litho press #1. It's my favourite, and I'm superstitious so its the only one I use.
Meet some of my ladies:
This is Wonder Woman and Snow White, getting all ready to be printed. I should mention that in this project I did not reference any actresses who may have actually portrayed some of my figures...I am not interested in reproducing those faces as much as I was interested in aging the characters themselves...So don't expect Wonderwoman or Xena to look like Linda Carter or Lucy Lawless in their 80s. That isn't the point itself of this project.
Moving on...
Prints Galore!
In the tatami natural paper, I've made editions of ten of each lady, which will remain untouched as a lithograph. I've also made editions of five on this brown linen wrapper paper over which I will screen some text under each figure as well as collage on their costumes. Yep, that's the plan, anyway.
Snow White.
Wonder Woman.
Moving on...
Xena, Warrior Princess and Princess Jasmine. I had done some nice tonal work on Princess Jasmine, that I ended up over-etching, which I am totally disappointed about. At the point that I was working on this stone, I was feeling overwhelmed by a seeming lack of time so I didn't try to counter-etch and redraw (which I would have to do later with another stone anyway), which I now regret, as I have no intention of "whitewashing" these characters, but I think what I will do, when all twelve women are completed in January, is go back in and give some colour to every woman with some hand tinting. I'll either go with a pochoir or pastel technique or maybe some watercolour. I'm going to have to test how those mediums will work out with my paper first though.
Princess Jasmine
Xena, Warrior Princess.
A new stone, a new set of drawings...
Introducing Storm, Vixen and Pocahontas:
Once again, due to using a pencil that wasn't greasy enough, when I went to do a second etch, all the skin colour I did came right off. What a horrible limitation of an artist; who can't portray colours of skin! Bullshit! What a weird way for racism and art techique to collide. Calling myself on my own bullshit--this having happened before with attempts with tusches and cross-hatching--I decided to take a step-back, counter-etch, redraw and carefully etch yet again. There was no way I was gonna let this mistake go uncorrected.
So here I go again...
Time for a brand new etching...
And now, to introduce Max Gueverra (Dark Angel) and Foxy Brown:
Yes...I've been double-stoning...
Dark Angel
Foxy Brown.
I'll be printing off these two stones over the next couple of days, barring me running out of paper, anyway. The second etches on the last two stones seem to have come out okay so far, and my images look pretty stable, so I'm hoping for the best.
Because I've had some issues with the etching of skin colour (recently and even in past projects) I've also been thinking about how fucked-up it is that many of today's notions of race are predicated on skin colour, making it so monolithic with no nuances. Such an obvious observation, yes I know. But I can't help think that notions of "people of colour" is that...colour and not colours, not to mention all the politics, history and social practices that we attach to this notion...What scares me about this project is the potential for merely reproducing hegemonic notions about race, gender and age and how freaking easy it would be to do so...and I wonder for myself, how many people would really care to notice if all I did do was re-produce and not venture into something critical...
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