silkscreen student

I signed up for a silkscreen course this spring at Otis, because I'd never been taught how to do it & only had various at-best-semi-successful projects through the years on the basis of self-taught winging-it. I'm super glad I took the class--it really opened printing doors for me & I even just ordered a washout sink for the garage (we're re-plumbing the back house, so I thought: why not throw that in too). I had some print ideas before I started, but decided to chuck 'em & experiment with non-computer processes such as rubylith & painting directly on negatives. Here are a few of the prints I made--I'm hoping to get some of them up into my etsy shop soon, as prints & wrapping paper...

I cut these birds (and the script on the top print) out of rubylith (sorry the only photo I have of the prints are behind a bird cupcake!)

then I did a series of prints using lines I'd painted directly on negatives: 

and finally I made a repeating pattern out of a kind of random pile of hand-cut circles, scotch taped down onto the screen before I exposed it: 

more 120 from 2012

the rest of my 2012 120 highlights: 

photo break

Whenever I'm back from a blogging hiatus, I like to post a bunch of my medium format (actual film!) photos from the past year, just to get caught up. When I'd finished the huge Williams-Sonoma project last year, literally the next day I got on a plane to Helsinki, to meet up with Alex, where he was working on his opera/video project. We spent 3 weeks traveling around Sweden & Finland & it was lovely & quiet & definitely not still summer, even at the end of August. Earlier in the year, before Williams-Sonoma (or BWS), we had two birding trips, one to Costa Rica & a second to southeast Arizona. I brought my camera along on both. and various trips to see family, too. here goes:  
 

Ok, that's a lot of photos. I'll put the non-Scandinavian photos up in a separate post. I posted a lot more photos on my instagram page while I was there. Lisa Congdon was also traveling around Scandinavia while we were, so it was fun to watch our instagram photos intersect & echo...