All beautiful / All colors / Imperfect

These prints were meant to represent an important belief/statement of an artist's voice. For my prints, I chose to make a piece that would address body image issues. I think it is important for everyone, especially young girls, to know that no matter how they look that they are beautiful. I wanted to make three different women of different shapes and sizes and a simple statement that they are all beautiful.

The first thing I needed to do was carving out a large piece of linoleum. This started out by me sketching out my design onto a large piece of drawing paper. It was pure contour; I traced all my lines with a 6B pencil. I then flipped it over onto my linoleum and scribbled on the back to transfer the 6B pencil. This cause the graphite to be backwards/mirrored so that when it flipped again on the print it would be correct. I carved out all the lines that showed up with the graphite, so I was ready to print.

To make the prints I used a brayer to coat the linoleum in ink, then I laid a moistened piece of paper on top and used a wooden spoon, rubbing hard on the back, or a press, which rolled over the top applying pressure. Both has plusses and minuses. I ended up 22 prints. My first print shown I went through the process using purple ink on a regular piece of paper. The print ended up coming out really good with a few smudges around the edges and on the three characters. I used a white paint pen to trace the three women so that they stood out more. Using water color I filled in the letters. After finishing I had to decide how to deal with the smudges. I ended up deciding to trace them with sharpie to make them even MORE obvious. This played with my theme of imperfections still being beautiful.

The next print shown I printed on a already manipulate background. I painted a rainbow on a piece of paper and printed on it with purple ink. The print came out pretty good and the rainbow showed through exactly how I wanted it to. I accidentally printed too low though. Some of the rainbow showed through the top and white space was left in some of the letters. I finished off the letters with water color. I liked the way my last one turned out, so I outlined all the imperfections again. My final print I created by spotting water color all over a white piece of paper. I dipped the brush in the paint and flicked it across the paper. I then printed on it with black ink, but purposefully chose not to throughly coat the linoleum so it would be spotty too. I then filled in the women with black paint pen so they were obvious. I really liked this one because of the messiness of it and how it played with my theme.