Attend, y'all!

i'll eat you up, i love you so

I think I have figured out what I want to do with my personal Etching project.
I have been treating all of my etching stuff like it has to be absolutely perfect because the process of etching seems so permanent (at least in my mind it does) and because I am a student I have this sort of perception that everything I do outside of my sketchbook has to be a totally pristine, complete, finished project.
I don't think that is the point though, so with a little encouragement from a few people I know I have cut a few plates and just started to draw on them. I'm just drawing and I am just going with what comes out so let's hope that is a good thing!
This doesn't seem huge, but it is kind of a big step for me to just grab a plate and draw whatever comes to my mind. I am treating this like a sketchbook, which is where most of my favorite work I do turns up.

Project "Etch-a-Sketch" if you will ;]

I will have more new things up later, meanwhile here is a dump of stuff I should put up more periodically but instead I am just doing it now (click to make them bigger):

Das all!

Murder in the Cathedral

Personal work using a quote from T.S. Eliot

Etching using hardground. Click to make it bigger.

Etching 2 Begins!!!

Here is my first print from Etching 2 class.
This is the most sane thing I have made so far; more to come soon.

Wenaz & Jellyfishez

These are two etchings I made outside of class this past semester.
I submitted them both to the Coraddi (UNCG's Art magazine) with a couple of other drawings, and the one of the sausages was chosen.
That was pretty cool I guess, but I wish they had picked a piece I had spent more time on.
Ooooooh Coraddi...

Anyway, I had to give the sausage one a title, and since Morgan wouldn't let me name it Portrait of my Roommate as a Vegan I had to call it Family.

Divas

In Etching, we were given an assignment to create our own assignment that had to do with time.
I had some ideas for etchings that I really liked, but I kind of got swooped up into a collaborative with Morgan, which was fun.

I had an idea(not for etching) to do The Greatest Art Show of All Time and just have different artists submit art for different categ ories, such as The Greatest Fictional Character of All Time or The Best Toilet Paper of All Time, etc. Morgan and I have a running joke about "Divas" and she took my idea and morphed it into The Greatest Divas of All Time.

I would have liked to develop one of the ideas that I had, but I still enjoyed working on this one.
Collaboratives are definitely learning experiences; the people involved have to learn to balance the work load, be understanding of ideas and obstacles, and combine their style of work with the others involved.

I'm not really pleased with how the final etching came out, but I think the images that eventually turned into a coloring book look pretty cool.

Here ya go, final print:

There were some real issues with Dolly's face (in the first run through she looked like a gremlin) and Marie Antoinette didn't turn out as hoped, but this is all a lesson in the technicalities of Etching. We transferred the images by tracing them through paper onto the hardground, then drawing in by hand, which seems like a pretty elementary way of doing it, but all in all, not a bad experience.

Here are the coloring book pages, please feel free to print and enjoy. 

The ones I drew are Dolly Parton, Lil' Kim, Marie Antoinette, Miss Piggy, Leslie Hall and Madonna.

Morgan drew Sophia (from Golden Girls), Cher, Cruella de Vil, Martha Stewart, Dennis Rodman and Frida Kahlo.

If you click them, they should come up in a new tab or window as larger images.

We forgot to include Catwoman in the book, so I stuck her on a sign above a stack of books for people to take in the art building.