"Rush Hour"

Here’s another annual epic process post for the panel/poster that’ll be the centerpiece at this summer’s show @ Flossie & May’s (June). One-upping last year’s “The Lodge” that contained 250 beavers… this time with a herd of 500 350ish caribou (more on the re-calibrated numbers later). Like for that last show, I like having an oversized piece be a tentpole of sorts for the rest of the show to hang around, hence the theme “’Bou Thang” for 2024, and it will also be rolled into a faculty show + the annual Ursa gig. 

This particular panel also served somewhat as a proverbial carrot at the end of a stick for another gig: it was to be my reward for getting some freelance finished FIRST. Turned out this was not the case at all, in fact, as usual it provided the perfect escape hatch away from any and all responsibilities a mature adult would pay attention to first. Priorities!

Whenever I start something on this scale this is right around this time I always ask myself the question “what the hell were you thinking,” but usually by then I’m already thoroughly committed (or at least ready to be committed), and so for the sake of closure gotta see it through too its ridiculous conclusion. Not all that different from life I suppose, but more meta later on.

The finished size of the art was modeled directly on the dimensions of an earlier piece that used an oversized vertical panel (11.75” x 36”) - I actually still had a couple frames laying around with prints of “Scenic View,” so that made for a convenient template. As a postscript to this point, the digital version was cleaned up and a couple tweaks made to resize the overall composition so as to fit better within the frame. I really wish there was a way to print the panel in the newspaper so that it spans across two pages. More below the fold...

I like process posts like this when the finished product (ie print version) is closely juxtaposed near the initial doodled version as appearing straight from the sketchbook. Then you can really see the amount of creative distance covered over the duration of the piece. And yeah, one of the things I frequently narrate my classroom demos (usually during showing how to patiently apply water with a brush – specifically a watercolor round – when doing a wash with the water-soluble Derwent pencil) with is the sage observation that you just gotta slow down and be patient when making some art, ‘cause that’s what makes it Fine Art, that it took so damn long to do. That’s one of the big differences between it and a cartoon, since you can always bang one of those out every other hour, day after day. So what I’m saying is discipline over the duration is a determining factor in who becomes an artist: it’s whoever keeps making art, duh. And the flip side of that is the duration/discipline to do it longer on each piece,.

Originally I was going to save some time and just ink directly over my pencils as per usual but I inadvertently used workable fixative so as to prevent smudging of graphite. This meant I would have been unable to erase the pencil lines after inking which in turn meant making for a really messy scan – time consuming to clean up.

So this all required using a light table - they'll be a specific pic of this process below - to ink directly onto another new layer, which was initially intended to be a thicker coverstock, but as it turned out – SURPRISE - it bled like crazy when testing with the dip pens, reminding me once again to always always always test out your materials beforehand. So then I thought about switching to doing the entire piece with just Microns (which didn’t bleed), or opting to ink directly onto a new sheet of the same lighter weight paper that the pencil was on, which also didn’t feather out and spread after inking.

Incidentally that particular stock was from a few palettes donated last year by the newspaper to the art department, and this was an oversized sheet with a watermark from a company by the name of Gilbert (evidently a now-defunct paper mill in Menasha, Wisconsin) and also indicated that it was recycled, 25% cotton stock.

I ran into a slight speed-bump while inking on this paper when the dip-pen nibs kept catching – one of the distinct advantages to using the usual Bristol board for normal panels - which didn’t make for much in the way of a nice smooth line weight quality. This in turn necessitated retrieving older, more worn-down nibs from home, since the ones on hand at the studio were relatively newer purchases that kept snagging on the fibers.

Eventually settled on a hybrid approach using a heavy, thick nib + thinner medium-weight one with dip-pens + Dr. Ph. Martin’s Black Star matte India ink, first the Speedball Hunt Globe Bowl #513EF for the heavier, bolder lines and then, second, the companion nib #512 which is also designated as “Extra Fine” but is comparatively much thinner than the former. The #513 is pretty much my go-to nib for ninety-percent of my drawing duties, since I have a heavy hand I tend to snap a lot of leads and other implements by using too much pressure. The rough surface texture of this paper ruled out any thought of using the last in the trinity, the crowquill, so time to reach for a couple Microns, in particular the 05 Micron for background + 01 Micron for stippling in extreme background.

The above-posted image shows one of the many full-sized templates sketched out at various points in the process so as to keep an eye on the evolution of the piece, and not lose sight of the overall composition. There was an overall rhythm and pacing to the “zones” as far as assigned line weight, so this shows the corresponding implement used. As with all previous poster-sized panels done before, Dateline Digital Printing ripped an oversized scan on their spiffy engineering/blueprint scanner.

This panel was originally titled “Brake Check” in honor of what I sometimes refer to as the “asshole parade” of people one encounters during the commute to the big city. I was even gonna hide one caribou with it's entire head firmly planted up the behind of another, but even if that was edited, there's are a few other random illustrations of other drivers exhibiting similar behavior (including one running the requisite wrong-way). Normally I’m up and on the road long before most folks are even awake, so as to avoid the sublime experience of being tailgated by folks who are far much more important than, say, a lowly art teacher, all on their way to their Really Important Jobs. Just kidding, I usually just assume it’s an issue of basic math: they simply can’t handle numbers over ten, so speed limits are essentially meaningless symbols expressing complex concepts beyond their ability to process. Or they just don’t care.

Detailed excerpt from "Heading for the River" 2017 Randall Compton

It’s always important to identify and acknowledge the hat-tips in one’s own work, and here I have to point to a painting that I walk & talk many groups of students past every semester while on our annual outings to the UAF Museum of the North. I always make sure to pause and point out on these field trips any works done by local legends which incidentally reinforce many repeated talking points raised in our critiques. In this instance it’s the phenomenal use of atmospheric perspective, specifically atmospheric diffusion as a way to enhance depth. The artist is Randall Compton, and the painting is titled “Heading for the River” (2017).

Meta: Pondering the Pattern: While immersed in the mark-making, I am given the chance to think back upon all of the many wrong choices that I’ve made over the course of my life. All of the mistakes and bad decisions that all add up to me being the person I am today, doing what it is I’m doing right now. Am I still just wasting time? These are the Big Questions that rouse themselves whenever the music stops (Meshuggah in this instance, along with a steady stream of Mastodon). 

Another aspect to these undertakings with projects of these caliber and scale projects is in seeing them all the way through to their completion. There’s plenty of time to stall out, lose momentum, maybe even… give up and move on to any of the multitude of other projects all screaming for attention. Even the comparatively simple act of stopping ought to be easier, but every time I look at it, I’ll see something else that needs work. Every. Single. Time. “How do I know when I’m done” is a common question heard in Beginning studios, and my answer is always “when you’re outta time.”

And speaking of homage and acknowledging the shoulders of giants, while lost amidst the texture, it recalled a recent reading about the art of Keith Haring, in particular his graphic black + white linework.

One thing that becomes clearer was how I’ve worked so many jobs that were much, much more pointless and stupid: repetitive and meaningless tasks, that shine a light on how, at the very least, with these pieces I was doing something that would at least have a concrete, tangible result. As in an original work of art. A paycheck? Probably not, though I anticipate selling a few tabloid posters and a few of the oversized 3.5' glossy prints.

Another perspective I’ve been mulling under such circumstances has been the discovery of old sketchbooks from highschool that features pages and pages of boxes and graphic doodles that supposedly can be symptomatic of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which would explain a lot of my behavior today.

Note that I wasn’t particularly obsessed with meeting those specific numbers, just setting some sort of goalposts helps move everything along to a finished piece. Which is good thing, because as it happened, somewhere between the finished ink version and the earlier sketched out compositions which estimated the herd varying from 500 - 700 rendered discreet forms (note the abstracted and stippled texture of the extreme background herds – which in my mind didn’t “count” towards the total number) I lost a couplefew hundred. So to my surprise it ended up being around “only” 350, give or take. This must be what wildlife biologists feel when doing aerial surveys of seasonal migrations, the science of guesstemationing. All of which is to say I now know what next year’s mega-panel must be: a flock o’ five hundred hungry redpolls pillaging a birdfeeder, and the year after that, culminate the series with a thousand salmon on a spawning run. Hey, it’s important to have goals in one’s life.

The meticulous and tedious process of coloring in the digital piece took a lot longer than I expected. After cleaning up random spots of the linework, there were a dozen discreet and separate steps for each segment of the herd zoomed in on for coloring, each requiring individual selection and/or cutting in shapes of discreet areas on each individual caribou: 1) bodies + antlers; 2) “background” layers of bodies + antlers made darker so as to push back/enhance depth; 3) lightening random bodies + antlers to do the same; 4) collars + tails + sidebar markings; 5) goatees + hooves + snouts; 6) everything else.

Grand total approximately six hours or so for the plotting + penciling, another six for inking; another twelve tweaking + coloring. So basically a 24-hour panel, spread out over a couple weeks. One thing that became amusingly apparent during the proofing stage at the printing shop was how anticlimactic it was - after investing so much time & energy into what ultimately will be a passing thought worth (maybe) (hopefully) a quick chuckle - to see a tabloid-sized reduction, not to mention when showing the piece off scaled down to print version as a Nuggets panel. But wow was it ever worth it to see the solution my intrepid editor came up with when the print version spanned about 90% of the entire newspaper’s page. Update: I got a super nice comment in person from someone while having coffee the next weekend, and it was a great way to make my whole morning. Also remember to stop on by the 'Bou Thang show out at Flossie & May's (see yesterday's post) to check out the original pencil + ink, and the framed print version of which posters will be available. Thanks!