· "Friends IV" print available online from GRSF

My whale v. squid print, "Friends IV", is available now online from the Giant Robot gallery!

This is a large print made up of eight 12 7/8" square panels that connect together to make an image that's over 2' x 4'. Each panel was hand-printed by me on a letterpress proofing press from hand carved linoleum blocks, and is one of a signed and numbered edition of 20. If you'd like more info on how this monstrosity came into existence, check out my progress reports that I wrote as I was working on it: #1 (Design), #2 (Carving), and #3 (Printing).

The print is available from the wonderful folks at Giant Robot SF, click here to go straight to my piece, but don't forget to check out the rest of the fantastic Printed Matter show online, too! The bargain basement price for "Friends IV" is $100!

· Progress Report #3 - Printing

So, here in our third and final post about my linoleum printing process, I wanted to give you an idea of how I printed the thing, and what the final art will look alike at the Giant Robot Printed Matter show, opening tonight (12/5)!

So, after carving all my linoleum, I had to mount them all on plywood blocks (generously cut for me by the wonderful Paul Stepahin). There were 15 blocks in all, eight for the black and seven for the red (there is just one panel, with the whale's flukes, that doesn't have any red in it). Here you can see the black blocks at a mid-point of the printing process (I've already printed the two blocks in the lower right hand side, as you can see).



Each of the blocks was set into the Vandercook press (at my work, Hello! Lucky: thank you, bosses!), which is a flatbed cylinder proof press. I had pulled prints on one before (the covers for Friends #3, for instance), but this was definitely by far the biggest project I had ever worked on, and I had a lot to learn, from registering the prints to cleaning the press at the end of the day! My mentor in all this was the incomparable Aaron Cohick, the head printer at Hello! Lucky and the proprietor of the fantastic New Lights Press. I learned so much durning the two weekends I spent printing, and I owe Aaron a considerable debt (maybe you can help me out by buying some of his amazing artists books, or his crazy new broadsides).

The red image (the squid + the whale's mean eye!) was printed first, since the red is a lighter intensity than the black print. The images below are from my second day of printing (I spent two 11-hour days on it!), so you will see the squid already printed and the whale being printed on top of that.



Because the blocks were so huge, and there were some irregularities with the linoleum, I would double ink the block, both by hand with a brayer (seen below), and as I pulled the prints, with the Vandercook's ink rollers. This added a ot of time to the process, but I got into a pretty good rhythm after awhile.


Below you can see one of the panels directly after printing the second color. For a final edition of 20 prints, I pulled about 34 of each panel (several were inevitably damaged, under-inked, or otherwise unusable), if you multiply that by the 15 blocks that's about 510 passes that this print took altogether! Yikes! I was definitely exhausted at the end of each day, but both the learning process and the end result were definitely worth it.




When I was done printing, I finally got to see the whole thing! I was really pleased... the print really is huge (you can see the pallet behind it for a sense of scale), and reflected the subject matter to a tee. I even like the irregularities of the print, I think there is a real beauty to it... some sections even look like they have a dappled, aquatic light on them that I couldn't have imagined would be there when I set out on the process. And of course, even though I knew it would happen, it's sort of shocking to see the whole thing flipped over!



Finally, I trimmed all of the sections down to 12 7/8" square. Below is a quickie montage of the eight sections together, I'll of course have a better photo up before long, that more accurately shows the piece in its entirety.




Thanks for your interest in this project, if you've been following along! Again, the print will be available as part of Giant Robot SF's annual Printed Matter show. The show opens tonight, Saturday, 12/5 (I'll be there early, around 6:00 - 7:30), and continues until 1/6/10. The prints, a numbered edition of 20, will be available for $100, both in the gallery, and online about a week later. After the show comes down I'll begin selling remaining prints on on the Family Style website and at comic/zine shows, I'll put up an announcement then! Again, thanks to Luke of GRSF, Paul, and Aaron for their encouragement and assistance!

· Progress Report #2 - Carving

So, having designed the image, and having already carved the first part (the whale), I set about carving the red squid portion of the design. I drew the image on a grid, and each square of 7/8" got blown up to 3 1/2" on the linoleum (each section is 13" x 13", to fit in the window panes of the door which inspired the project in the first place... which presented some problems in that linoleum really only comes in pieces of 12" x 12", so that in a few of the panels seams show where I had to add an extra inch to the blocks to fit... you can see such an extra piece in the middle of the photo below. I still like the way it looks, however).



It was a fairly simple process to take the smaller image and draw it on the larger grid, I would just look at an individual square and think "Okay, so this tentacle passes just under the upper right corner, and continues on the the middle of the left side", etc. Old school! You can't get a perfectly exact reproduction of your initial image this way, but that was part of the fun for me, to let the idiosyncrasies of the carving process take the image in somewhat new directions. I was especially taken with how well the process of carving worked with the subject matter of these undersea creatures in mortal combat... the details of a Sperm Whale's hide really are a tracery of gouges and scratches in a huge field of color (I was lucky enough to see Sperm Whales in New Zealand, and they really barely look alive, they are too big to take in). When I was carving in the small details, like the wrinkles around the eyes, for instance, I would use a sharpie to make the lines pop out more and be easier to visualize. Overall, the final design was very close to my original drawing.



The tricky part was trying my best to make sure that the squid blocks lined up correctly with the whale blocks. Using the grid, I would line us the blocks up, one on top of the other, and use an awl to make little punch marks at the edges of where I would have to carve away the black block to show the red image (for instance, where a tentacle lay over the whales body). I tried to be very meticulous, but I won't really know how well I did until I print the black over the red and see! Yikes!



Okay, that's it for now... I'll be back next week with a post about the actual printing of the thing, with the extraordinary assistance of Aaron Cohick of New Lights Press. Until then, have a happy Thanksgiving!

· Print Project - Progress Report #1

I have been slowly chugging along on a large-scale linoblock print for a month or so now... as always with me, the process was in fits and starts, I'd do a lot of drawing one weekend, carve the linoleum another, but there would be huge gaps in between where the whole project got shelved.

So, I was delighted when I ran into Luke, the manager of Giant Robot SF, at APE, and he asked me if I had anything I'd like to include in the upcoming Printed Matter art show (Dec 5). I'm really honored to be included in such a terrific show (I haven't seen the line up yet, but the print show I worked a few years back was excellent, and I'm sure that Eric and Luke are doing a bang-up job curating this one), and it has lit a fire under my ass to get this project finished.

I'm going to be updating this blog with progress reports for the remainder of the month, as I finish my design, carve everything, and finally pull the prints. This is certainly the biggest and most chalenging printing project I've yet to embark on, so I'm sure that it will be a learning experience for me, and perhaps interesting for you, too!

Part 1 - Design

The impetus for this work comes from the realm of interior decorating, as it happens! About a year ago my girlfriend Hannah and I came across a construction site... they were refurbishing a house and there was a very nice window frame sitting outside. We asked the contractor if we could take it. "Sure thing", he replied, "but what about these, too?" Inside the gate there were dozens of frames in varying states... We picked out a few especially cool ones: a very large (35" x 48") picture window and a eight-pane door. The picture window I used as a frame for a beautiful but battered canvas I had found in an abandoned house in Oklahoma, but we weren't sure what to do with the door. We ended up putting panels of decorative paper in each of the panes for our holiday party last year, which was fine, but we both really felt that it wasn't engaging enough.



After ruminating on it for a bit, I realized the long format of the door would perfectly frame the image of a whale. I love nature illustrations and nautical imagery (Moby Dick has long been at the top of my "favorite books" list), and I liked the idea of the design, a huge whale, being chopped into smaller panels, a bit like a comic, or the painting Nila byWalton Ford, one of my all time favorite artists. With that in mind, I drew out the design:



Then I spent a Saturday afternoon carving it from linoleum, expanding it by grid from a 14" x 7" drawing to eight 13" x 13" pieces (so the whole thing will be big, over 2' x 4'!):




But I decided that the design wasn't quite "there" yet. The compliment to the piece was more inspired by color than anything else: I had been slightly obsessed with black-and-red print designs (I'm planning on using that palette on the next issue of Friends), and the black bulk of the whale conjured in my mind a red counterpoint, as if the colors themselves were having a battle of dominance. So I added in a Giant Squid to battle my Sperm Whale, drawing it in with red gouache. I'm really pleased with the result.



So now I've got to do some more carving, jigsaw piecing the squid in with my completed whale and mounting all the pieces onto plywood. I'll have another post up this week with pics of the carving process.

· New Stuff: Bird Brain + Pen Pals

I've got a couple of new things coming out for the upcoming SF Zine Fest:


The first is the premiere issue of my ongoing nature journal series, Bird Brain. BB will be a series of slim little zines, with fairly high production values (full-bleed, book-trim, rounded corners, Gocco covers), and a bunch of my journal entries and illustrations from my bird-watching. Expect another issue out for APE in the Fall.
Also, in the spirit of maintaining some regularity with releases of Bird Brain, I'm going to be updating this blog on a semi-frequent basis, with my sketches, thoughts, and journal entries regarding birds and nature. Bird Brain is currently available on my Etsy page, look for it in the Family Style catalog soon. Coming shortly: A few of my notes from a canoeing trip on the Russian River in June!



The second new product is a rather fun one: "Pen Pals" Stationery Grab Bags! I've gone through my overly expansive collection of I Japanese stationery, goofy postcards, and a couple of hand-printed pieces, too, like my "Quail Mail" and "Snail Mail" designs... I had a lot of fun drawing up the little packaging, inspired by (of course) Japanese designs, and also this guy Aaron Meshon, who's little products have very fun and cute packaging! You can get your Pen Pals grab bacg on my Etsy page, too!

· Vampire Club

While I was up in PDX for the Stumptown Comics Fest I did a couple of doodles in my sketchbook that I am now giving some extra love and attention... Here is the illo that led Jesse Reklaw to call it my "facials sketchbook." Um, I better color this red soon. Gross.

· Interview with Sari

Interview with Sari
Originally uploaded by François Vigneault

Being in school now, I occasionally have the sorts of assignments which lend themselves to a bit of creative license. I recently had to conduct an interview with someone outside of my cultural/ethnic/national group... I had originally wanted to interview my friend Massoud, a filmmaker who was a student in Iran during the revolution 30 years ago, but he wasn't available, unfortunately (I'm still hoping to get an interview out of him!). But I had a great back-up candidate, the owner of my neighborhood liquor store, Tim's (there is no Tim, I found out). Sari was very obliging with his time and in addition to my presentation in class, I drafted this very quick (less then 1 1/2 hours) comic with some of his interesting reflections on his life in the U.S. versus his life in Palestine... It was fun to draw up something so quickly; I might do some more of these "talking head" style interview comics.