Exploring Printmaking and 16mm Photography, 9/27/2025
September 27, 2025
Yikes! Over a week since my last blog update. And I had initially intended to write one daily… Well, at this point it looks like I’ll do them when I feel like it, which also works. I have enough daily writing practices! A lot has happened since my last entry and I will try to get to everything best as I can.
It’s been a productive couple of weeks in terms of exploring new mediums. My time spent painting has been at a minimum, actually– besides today, which I will get to. Instead of painting, I have been spending a lot of time in the print shop at the Art Students League developing some lithographs. This has been extremely exciting for me. The process is a lot more physical and scientific than I ever expected. My first day in the class was entirely spent grinding two heavy slabs of limestone together for four hours until they were both perfectly flat. Then I finally started to get an image on there. One of the main reasons I was interested in trying printmaking in the first place is because I wanted to see how the medium could transform my paintings. With lithography in particular, I’m interested in getting a better understanding of value composition. I am hoping that learning lithography will enhance my paintings and vice versa. So, for my first lithograph, I tried adapting this street scene I painted earlier this year into a black and white image. I also took the figure out, since I have an idea to animate on top of one of the prints I turn out. I may try hand coloring a couple of them too with watercolor or Ecoline inks.:
The painting I am adapting into a lithograph
My image drawn on the limestone slab. The image has to be drawn on using a greasy ‘crayon’ so that you can later treat the surface with acid to be water-repellant in those areas. I think…
Speaking of animation, another exciting studio development from the week is that I finished my rotoscoping experiment! Here it is– Titled “Dream Door”:
I really love the way it turned out. It has just the vague, dreamy, perhaps creepy look I was going for. 24 hand painted cels in total, each photographed over a used monotype plate for a background. Actually the transparent monotype plate is laying on top of the monotype it produced— that’s what’s appearing in the photographs. I’m very pleased that there is no glare or reflection visible on any of the images. It took me a minute to get the lighting set up right– one diffused lamp on either side of the image did the trick.
After I got all my pictures, I loaded ‘em into photoshop and put the whole thing together with the Timeline tool. This was the most annoying part of the whole process. I don’t have an external hard drive and the images that come out of my camera are enormous, so when I was trying to export the animation as a GIF, I kept struggling with the size of the file. This could all be solved quite easily if I just got an external hard drive, but I don’t wanna. I want to find an animation process that doesn’t involve photoshop or computers at all.
Which brings me to the next development of the week. Yesterday I met up with Matthew Thurber in Greenpoint and he generously lent me his 16mm Bolex camera for the week! Shout out to him for trusting me with it, because I personally would never lend out my equipment to students… But I’m the best student, so of course I’ll be very careful with it. He showed me a little bit about how to use it. I’m afraid all of my shots are going to be terribly under or overexposed, but if at first you don’t succeed try try again. Actually, I guess it won’t matter too much as long as I can see the movement on the film. I’ve been going around filming anything that looks interesting (mostly Karla running around in the park, barking at other dogs) then I plan to rotoscope out all of the motion, same way I did the “Dream Door” animation. And I guess I’ll go from there. We’ll see what the motion suggests once it’s all isolated. But motion capture on film is an exciting new medium, a lot of aesthetic possibilities come to mind, especially since the Bolex has a ‘double exposure’ capability. I’ll have to try that a couple of times this week.
As you can see, painting has taken somewhat of a backseat recently because I am just so excited about learning new ways to make images, and especially new ways to make them move. I only wish I had a good narrative I was working with, rather than these abstract clips of motion. I want to make a character with a personality who moves through a story with a plot. You know, a real movie. Something people want to see, that others can relate to. Alas, my writing and storytelling skills are still not where I’d like them. My Frog Ephemera script is getting a bit crazy out of control. I wonder how important it is to really know where the story is going– do any writers really know? Or do I have to just keep writing until the story arc and the character’s true personalities finally reveal themselves? Since I have no clue how to go about planning a story from start to finish, I’m going with option B, though it seems more of a roundabout way of doing things. I printed out all 32 pages I’ve written so far and will maybe try to do some handwritten edits. If I can unify what I have now, perhaps the path forward will become a bit more clear.
Today is the longest I’ve spent here in the studio since… geez, I don’t know when. I got here at 11:30 AM and won’t be leaving until 7:30 PM, since I promised my studiomate I would help her write something when she got here at 6. Until she gets here I’ve been working on the commission painting, which is coming along quite well. I’m really proud of the way I’ve been able to develop this difficult composition so far, and the whole experience has really been building my confidence as an artist who can work with others to deliver a collaborative vision. This will probably be the longest I’ll spend here until next week, too. Tomorrow I have my first ever choir practice, then I would like to spend Monday and Tuesday in the printmaking studio. I have to teach on Monday and Tuesday evening, too…
This Wednesday through Saturday I’ll be in Amherst, MA checking out the MFA program at UMass. I have a particularly good feeling about it– and not just because they were they only grad department to respond to my emails. I’ll be happy to learn more about the program up close and hopefully will get the chance to speak with some current grad students, too. Besides that, it’ll be really nice to get out of the city with Sam for a few days. And I’m done typing now. This has been quite a long entry.
Til next time.
–Finn
