My project for course: Daily Sketching for Creative Inspiration

My project for course: Daily Sketching for Creative Inspiration

For my final project, I selected one of my 30-Day Sketch Prompts - "Sketch using a medium you are unfamiliar with."

To see the rest of the Sketch Prompt thingies, here are those artifacts...

The class instructor introduced the Pentel Ink Brush in her course, and I thought I'd give that a try. Probably because I was not used to using it, I found it hard to control my line weights - though this added some looseness and levity to the illustration, I think. My first illustration was a product of a half-asleep daydream, and I liked the concept for a skater-punk sort of aesthetic.

I didn't get direct feedback from the course, but I bounced some ideas off of my son to see what he thought. His suggestion was to use chopsticks (I agree!) I tried a couple different layouts to see if I could improve things. I intended to put the image on a tee shirt, so one thing I was ambivalent about the original design was that the action all points to the right. I decided to explore going vertically. This would have a better center balance and would also allow the skeleton hand to not get lost in all the red muck.

My goal was to create a tee shirt with the image for my son's 15 years on the planet. I was able to create a 4-color design on 3 screens. I used a photo-emulsion on 3 home-made silkscreens and exposed them with a new UV lamp which worked pretty well (but not as well as the Texas summer sun! or, not as quickly, I should say.) The prints turned out not quite as good as I hoped, but acceptable. I don't have a true press, so I'm having to eyeball (!) everything through the flooded screens. The tee shirt also got an ink smudge on it, so I washed it and the ink didn't hold well even though I heat-set it. Maybe I didn't do that long enough or with enough heat? I'm still new to this whole process.