It's Tearing Me Apart

Another assignment from last semester: create two one-page comics, both telling the same story, one very quickly and one very slowly. This was my twofold interpretation of a colloquialism. It turned out really emo. Here's the second comic:

There was another row of panels on the bottom of this page when I originally drew it, but I never got around to inking them and then I lost the original (which sucks so hard- I think I left it in the copy machine). It showed the second girl (the head on the right, above) walking up and reinserting the first girl's eyeball into her socket. Without that piece of this brief narrative, the two comics don't relate quite as well to each other, but on its own I like the second comic better sans the final row. As a portfolio piece I'm very happy with the drawing styles and composition of both of these comics, but thematically I cringe when I look at them; as stated before, totally emo, and also that chick on the right looks like an anime character.

Fiber Portfolio 3

I hope you all had a happy Halloween! Here is the third installment of my Fibers portfolio from freshman year; soon I'll put up pictures of the costume I made myself last week.


Apart from knitting and crocheting we also had to do weaving. The tiny weave above was done on a frame loom, that is, a picture frame turned into a miniature loom. I like to think of it as some kind of tiny moon-and-mountain-scape.


The rest of our required techniques all involved printing or dying of some kind. Above is a detail of one of my Shibori samples. Shibori is a Japanese practice of sewing and wrapping silk (or linen, in my case) tightly with string or thread and then dying it, allowing the string to create patterns where the dye cannot penetrate. This example was done by wrapping peaks of fabric and dying with several different colors.



These two were the stitched Shibori. You can see in the details below how the fabric has been crimped by the thread I pulled through it. (These are poor examples for Shibori - had I done them better the light areas would be free of dye. It's really hard!)




And last but not least, here is my blockprinting sample. You can see the pattern I made for this in this photo. I cut two symmetrical foam 3"x3" squares into stamps and made a two color pattern out of them. I quite like this.

Pisanka

Turning blown eggs into Pisanki eggs is an old Polish tradition. They are made through a wax-relief dying process, and generally patterned with abstract geometric patterns or natural images.


Deborah introduced me to Pisanki eggs when I was about 12, and we would spend hours in Cazadero making them. Deborah opted for the patterns, but I opted for vignettes.


This is my favorite egg I've made, which is good because I have no idea where the rest of them are. On one side is a sorcerer in a red spiraled suit, extending his arms to this little boy in a bubble on the opposite side.


The process begins with a white or brown egg. Using a small metal cone on the end of a stick, you scoop up beeswax, melt it over a candle, and draw with the narrow end of the cone. This area will remain white or brown (here, the hands and face of the sorcerer). You then dye the egg the next lightest color (here yellow) and draw again, covering what you wish to remain that color (the boy's face, the sorcerer's ruff, the border of the bubble). These steps continue through however many colors you desire, until the final color is reached, and the wax is melted off the egg, revealing the colors and polishing the egg's surface.


It is a convoluted, difficult process to hold a 3-D egg-shaped composition in your head and work from the lightest color out on a bare, 2 inch canvass. It's even more difficult not to break it afterward.

Lace

My most recent project for Fibers was to research a textile and interpret it.
Lace is about two things: sex and death. Secondarily, it is also about delicacy, wealth, exploitation, and ruin for the sake of beauty.

The How:

My roommate Molly (pictured here) and I made stencils of each other lying on the floor.


Using one piece of lace (6 yards long) I cut out the figures at opposing ends of the material, leaving them connected by extremely long legs, and died Molly's half black.



Lastly, I screenprinted specific parts of each figure with cardboard from some box I found in a dumpster and hung from the cieling of the critique room with fishing wire.