Screensprinting

Yesterday in computers I screenprinted for the very first time. I chose to print a portrait of my beloved boyfriend over and over again. Above is the straight print that I made. Purple is both his and my favorite color. Below, I printed him onto an unfinished crossword puzzle. I think he looks very contemplative in his picture, so I matched him with like backgrounds.

Under him in this print is some two-point perspective drawings of boxes. I think it also evokes a sort of intellectual environment that goes well with his expression.

I had a lot of fun screenprinting, and I hope its something that I get to do sometime again in the near future.

Melinda Steffy

This morning Melinda Steffy came to speak to us in the lecture. She started with showing her some of her recent artwork, which consisted of themes of mythology, alchemy, family history, and memory and loss. She also has a job as an in-house designer at a music school as her day job, but about a quarter of her yearly income comes from her online vending on the website Etsy, which she talked about for the remainder of the lecture.

Selling online has some advantages, such as the ability to reach a global audience, the customer may browse all items easily, written descriptions add additional infomation that a customer in a store would not get, the ability to work when it is convienient for you, and less money is commissioned and more money goes dircetly to you. Etsy is currently the "go-to" website when people are looking for handmade items. Esty's goal is to reconnect makers with buyers through the internet and to allow people to make a living making things. It's not a very good website to sell fine art, whereas supply vendors usually do the best bussiness.

Melinda has two stores on Etsy, one called Fabrik, in which she sells reusable produce bags, and one for jewelry, Julre. She currently has strong sales; she had started with just the people she knows, and now the majority of her customers are new.

She gave us some tips on how to seel things on this website. The first thing to do is to decide what to sell. It should be functional, decorative, and unique. In other words, it should be something that you can't find in a department store. It should also be something you can make in multiples and something that you enjoy making, keeping in mind the profir margin for your time and materials.

Melinda also stressed the importance of presentation. The photos of your items should be clear, eyecatching, and descriptive. Images make the sales. the description of an item should also be clever, useful, and as descriptive as possible. This is the sales pitch.

It's also important to also be active on the website in order to maintain visiblility. Melinda does this by relisting or listing a new item every day. Moreover, in order to get repeat customers and to stress the handmade aspect of the product, Melinda suggested that the item should be shipped in one or two days, packaged craefully and attarctively, and include a handwritten note.

Now if I ever want to sell anything on Esty, I know exactly how to go about it.

Projects

This is my tank man project that I made for computers class. We were told to recreate the entire image. For mine, I replaced the tanks with pictures I found of wounded protestors from the Tiananmen Square Massacre an the lamppost with cameras capturing the event that according to the Chinese government never happened.

This is the face project that we mad in Illustrator a while ago. We put our faces in the scanner, made the shapes based on those in the picture, and then pieced them together again. I had a lot of trouble in doing this project, but I was very satisfied with how far I had come in using Illustrator.
This is a photoshop project in which we exaggerated a current event. My current event had to do with how a certain airline was charging overweight passengers for two seats when they flight attendants saw the were having trouble fastening their seat belts.
In this photoshop project I drew a picture with crayons. Then I scanned it into photoshop and recreated some of the image with the paint tool. I played a lot with the opacity of the marks I was making and tried to make the original image underneath still visible.

Jakob Fenger

Jacob Fenger, a member of a group in Denmark called Superflex, came to speak with us this morning. Their work mainly deals with copyright issues.

In the first project he told us about, Jakob said they had been thinking about the relationship between the North and South, Europe and Africa. With this in mind, they created a biogas system to create energy for families in low income countries. They then started thinking about lamps and how they really aren't any nice lamp designs for these same families. From this idea, they constructed lamps identical to a very famous, copyrighted lamp that ran on their biogas. They were sued immediately.

They play alot with the idea of what is copy and what is original. In this same realm of ideas, they also did a project with Lacoste polo shirts. Jakob explained that the knock off copies are often times mades in the same factories as the originals. The group attempted to make a copy of a Lacoste polo original by adding the text "SUPERCOPY" stampted onto the shirts. they were also sued for this.

Some other more successful projects (for which they were not sued) include the creation of a soft drink containing guarana, the product of Guarana Antarctica. They make quite a statement by using the company's logo on their bottle but placing Superflex's product name, Guarana Power, over top so that only a little of Guarana Antarctica's shows but it is still recognizable. This was about as much as they could do without getting sued. Another project included a very famous chair design. To make it original, they took the chairs and cut parts of it off. Another still involved creating the first open source beer recipe. The name they gave it translates to "Our Beer." The recipe is free for anyone to use, and you can even download the labels for the bottles.

Superflex now has a series of Copyshops in which they sell their products that deal with the issue of copyrighting.

Doug Bucci

Doug Bucci came to speak to us this week about how technology has influenced his work. He originally entered his art school with the intention of being a painter. Then when he took his first painting elective, he found himself bored and disappointed. He then discovered the metal studio, where he felt as if he were at home.

Doug said that he found that he liked feeling insecure though, and took an opportunity to play with cad and 3D modeling. He had also intended to be a teacher, but he put that on hold while he applied to graduate school. There, he put aside everything he knew, which was about metals to start over with cad and 3D modeling.

After grad school, he began siezing all the opportunities he has: working for industry, starting his own studio, and starting his own bussiness. He did commercial work for some time, to challenge himself, but then there came a point when he noticed he could make a living by simply being an artist and doing what he wanted to do. His work evolved into something in which his materials and tools of is orginal media, metals, began matching with what he had in his head, the cad and 3D modeling. The only question was of what he wanted to do with this evolution.

He was suddenly inspired by two jewelry makers who were also diabetics, like Doug. They were two people whom he strongly admired and with which he identified. From then to now, his work has been based on subjects concerning diabetics, combining the ideas of soft tissues and hard metals, working to create his equivalent of the breast cancer ribbons and extending his ideas much further. Doug still does jewelry, too. He has taken his idea of what jewelry is, which is from when he was growing up in the 80s, and mixed it with his diabetic ideas.