A contest for people who like my prints.

I've been in the process of trying to find a domain name for my yet-to-be-designed website and I'm having a bit of trouble. Turns out that Matt Nelson isn't altogether a unique name and pretty much every variation of that theme has been taken. I had toyed with the idea of matthasnarcissistictendencies.com, but I really have a hard time spelling "narcissistic" and so it's probably a lot to ask of anybody else, though I feel it is somewhat memorable. Then I though that I could just shorten it to the more user-friendly "n.t.," as in matthasnt.com, but then it reads Matt hasn't. Matt hasn't what? And I don't want people going into the experience of my website with that negative conotation. I've toyed with a number of other ideas, most of which are completely unoriginal, which probably speaks volumes about who I am and the level of my creativity.

And so I am opening it up to you, whoever might read this, to give me any suggestions you may have to help me out. Knowing that people like winning prizes (at least I do so I assume that other people do too), if I pick your idea, or even if your idea inspires me to do something else I will reward you with a print (of mine) of your choice. That's a 30-100 dollar value. You can't put a price on that.

So here comes the fine print:
1. My website will showcase (that's a nice word) my portfolio of both printmaking and graphic design work so the name needs to either incorporate or ignore both of these aspects. 2. Jurying these ideas will be done entirely by me in what I will assure you is a completely unbaised manner. 3. Please don't be offended if I don't choose yours, it doesn't mean I don't like you or think you're great. It just means I don't like your idea. 4. All entries must be in by 11:59pm mst on Thursday, March 5, 2009. 5. I have a "plan b" in case I don't decide to go with anybody else's idea, I'm just not completely sold on my own idea.

Game on!

Warehouse show.

Last night was the annual student warehouse show. This year it was a combination of artwork and music where the entry fee and 20% of all artwork sold went to help out the wife of this guy that died unexpectedly. Congratulations to by best friend for taking "Best in Show" for the above piece. She's so talented.













Ryan Gregson played and did an amazing job, even if much of it was the guitar-equivalent of lip-syncing.













One of the highlights of the night was seeing my Graphic Interface professor play the keyboard with his band, Resistor Radio. They were LOUD. Before they started a bulk box of earplugs made their way through the crowd.













And these guys actually put on a really good show. They're called Battle School and as near as I can tell the guy on the left side of the stage was up there only to control all the lights, but it really added to the performance.

Hair.

Announcement:
Due to all the self-esteem building comments about my hair last week, I have now cut it all off.

For people who notice hair-growth.

Last Thursday and Friday was our first-annual printmaking Tshirt sale. $10=1 tshirt. Overall I think we did pretty well, though I don't know the final numbers. Our number one seller was the shirt on the manikin that says "keep your love to yourself." Mine is on the edge of the picture in red. Maybe later I'll post another picture of it. In the mean time here's something else for you to enjoy:



















I thought I looked pretty emo in this picture, but I've heard that I look like a lesbian. If you want more check out Whit's blog.

P.S. I'm sure all of you have heard about In-N-Out coming to 12195 South Factory Outlet Drive in Draper. That is the Draper in Utah, yes. In celebration I wore my In-N-Out shirt in the picture above, as I'm sure you could tell....

banjo

Here's about halfway through my current woodcut. On top of this will be two values of brown in the hat, hair and banjo. Then on a separate block I will carve black line work that will (hopefully) pull it all together.

free music video of the week.

I've got a huge project due and so naturally I'm not working on it at all and instead opted to work on printmaking. I've got a picture of my current work-in-progress that I'll post later but I have no way to get it from my camera on to my computer to post it right now.

If anyone hasn't downloaded the Music Video of the Week from iTunes this week you should. I enjoyed and there's a good chance you might too. The artist is called Metronomy and the song is "A Thing For Me."

photogravure

A little about photogravure. It's like the unwanted lovechild of photo and printmaking. I say unwanted because most of the photo people I have talked to say it's more of a printmaking process while the printmakers claim the opposite. Nothing like nobody wanting you for Christmas.

That said, it's a great process. The jist of it is that you take a photo like the one above, make a transparency out of it and through a series of tedious steps etch it onto a copper plate then print said plate Intaglio-style. My result wasn't as good as some of the others and I don't feel like it's done. Aside from lacking a whole lot of contrast I'd like to try some multiple-plate stuff and maybe add some color just to see what happens. I'll post the results as they come.

happy accidents

Last weekend I took part in a workshop on Photogravure (I'll explain in a later post) and had a lot of down time so I started scanning in some of my photos from the blackbird, fly. Here is an example of how amazing the Sam's Club technicians are, though I think this one is something of a happy accident. Notice how the picture changes half way through? Two of the 16 pictures I got back were like that and about 6 more had a small strip at either the top or bottom of the photo.

I was only able to get one negative strip scanned but I'll try to finish up the rest later this week, along with posting an image of my photogravure print.

jazz game

Here is a great picture of my mom after the Jazz game we went to last week. You'll notice the logo on her jacket is an RW for Rocawear, which I believe, and confirmed on Wikipedia, is the clothing line started by Jay Z. If you know my mom you should realize just how out of place this is. Apparently sometime in the past couple years that I've lived away from home she got some street credit and is now representing it.

bbf

I've developed my first roll of film from the blackbird, fly but it'll be a little bit before I can get them scanned. My conversation with the "technician" when I was dropping the roll off:

Me: The film has been exposed over the sprocket holes too, is that going to be a problem?
Them: Probably. We don't have photoshop.
Me: ...? I don't follow.
Them: ...We can only print what's in between the sprockets.
Me: Ok, just do that. It'll at least give me an idea of what's on there.
Them: We could just process the film.
Me: No, I want prints.
Them: Are you sure? Then you could just scan them in.
Me: I'll do that anyways, but I want prints. And can I get them printed with a border?
Them: No... well, yes.

Needless to say I was pretty surprised to find that when I got the prints the "technician" had taken some "artistic liberties" and printed most of them with a bar of the next shot on one side of the print. Most of them were pretty small bars but two prints came back with it split right down the middle. I actually really like the way those two turned out.

I hope that all made sense. I've found out in the past couple years what a horrible explainer I am.

moosen

This is probably my favorite picture of Whit and I ever. I just found it again.

blackbird, fly and new year's weekend.

Well, I hope everyone had an enjoyable New Year. I did. I figure any New Years adventure that involves cops showing up has to be good, right? No, it wasn't anything alcohol or nudity related. Instead it involved some friends getting booted and throwing a snowball at the booter's car. An hour and a half later the cops, who I'm sure had nothing better to do on New Years Eve, showed up and gave us all a good scolding, because it is their duty to do so.

Beyond that, we went down to Provo for Whit's brother's wedding. We decorated his car and went through all the standard fare of oreos, shaving cream, plastic wrap and a large box of condoms, but also involved a 5 foot high bag of packing peanuts. Come to find out that last part should only be done on the very rarest of occasions to your worst enemies. It really crossed a line. I found out first-hand what it is like to clean out a car like that when we found out that the bride and groom missed their flight and spent the day in the airport trying to get another flight to Houston so they wouldn't miss their 3000 dollar cruise. After a day like that nobody should have to deal with a car full of packing peanuts. It all worked out in the end, today they are flying to Jamaica where the boat will pick them up on Wednesday.

More good news, as you can tell from the photo above my Blackbird, Fly arrived! It comes in this great plastic birdcage for storage. It's a little bit smaller than I had imagined but I'm excited to really try it out. I found a roll of film that very well could be from before my mission (8+ years) and I took a couple shots at the wedding on Saturday. I can already tell that I've been spoiled by digital photography and fancy DSLRs because I forget that I have to manually focus and wind the film.

Also on Friday I went to the BYU museum of art to see their show on Japanese Wood Block prints. All the prints are from their permanent collection and we actually got to talk for a while with the curator of the museum about the history of the prints. I've always been impressed with the prints but it's nothing until you see them in person. I always assumed that the prints were actually mixed-media because of the amount of detail, particularly in the typography, but it has all been meticulously carved to look that way. I tend to spend a lot of time working on my prints, but seeing these prints made me feel like I rush my way through all of it.











I found this on Scott Hansen's blog:

"If you count yourself among the ranks of web designers you know that Internet Explorer is still the bane of our collective existence. At some point, long ago, when Microsoft ruled the browser universe, some genius over there decided to give a big middle finger to all of us designers and our so-called 'web standards'. The result is that things just don’t look the way we as designers intend in IE: CSS elements don’t render properly and various functionality breaks down forcing us to implement IE-specific hacks and tweaks to make it all work. Well, MS, in their infinite wisdom, have finally decided to back down and have announced that the forthcoming eighth iteration of their Internet Explorer browser will embrace web standards. What a novel concept! Embracing web standards in a web browser? What will they think of next?"

don't wait up.

The other day Whit's niece helped me find a name for my new camera. After some heated words we settled on Marcella.

Today I was running some errands and decided to spend some time getting to know her. I rifled through the user's manual and took a couple shots around town, all the while falling more and more deeply in love. I'm thinking that this might be it: the human/digital camera equivalent of soul mates.

As you can see I've been having fun cross-processing my pictures, but it's just for pretends. And the vignette might be a bit heavy on the above image, that is my kryptonite.

I also ran across this list of the supposed 100 best photoshop tutorials of 2008. Some of them are pretty standard, nothing too special, but others do seem very promising.

post-christmas rambling.

It's funny how easy I find myself complaining about how nobody is updating their blogs enough, and then I look at the last time I updated mine... 5 weeks ago?! So in an effort to not be so hypocritical, here I am updating my blog.

Christmas was spectacular. I really don't deserve the great family and friends that I have. Some hightlights:
1. My incredibly understanding wife getting me a new camera despite my inability to hang on to one. This time will be different, I swear.
2. Finding out that my nephew's nickname is Cracker.
3. New bikes.
4. Playing Ticket to Ride with my wife, my bff, Adrienne, and her sister, Brooke. Then playing Cranium with all of them and Brooke's husband and finding out that my team will always lose, no matter how it's made up.
5. I always look forward to the visits from Santa Bookie (not the betting kind of bookie) at Whit's house every Christmas.
6. Whit got a Wii.
7. I may or may not have gotten a Blackbird, Fly. Right now I have a paper that says one is coming but apparently the only US distributor isn't very reliable so for now I'm sitting in eager anticipation.
8. Cats + Laser pointer = good times.
9. Being done with buying Kidrobot Simpsons after successfully getting Homer and Maggie.

Depending on if the print studio is open this week I will post soon showing the progress on my Intaglio plate.

"The Secret World of Onions"

Well, I'm half way through printing my edition of 12 and I think the lack of sleep is catching up to me. There's that and my right forearm is killing from the combination of carving for hours and my unenthusiasm for going to work out--ever. I'm happy with the print though so I guess it's all worth it.

Oh, and if you have the chance, our ceramics program is having their annual holiday sale through Saturday. You can find some what, to my untrained eye, are some pretty amazing flasks, pot, cups, plates, etc. I still have the question of if they are intended for use or solely artistic display? One vase even comes with fake flowers, to sweeten the deal. I probably should have done something like that to sell more prints at our print sale.

A work in progress.

Here's progress on the latest woodcut I'm working on. Considering I should have at least 4 more prints done by the end of the semester (3 weeks) this one should be done by the end of the week. Right now I'm finding that it's hard for me to be motivated to do anything for any class outside of printmaking though all of them need work.

I'm trying to decide if I'm liking my new layout. I was having a hard time before feeling like things were really cramped and I am definitely liking the breathing room but I'm feeling like it needs something else. When it comes down to it, I think I would have been just as happy if I could have simply tripled the size of the gutter in between the columns.

Well, I enjoyed this.

.

I've always wanted to do one of these but it will probably have to wait until after graduation. Or... maybe over Christmas break. Hmmm...

sometimes i don't like coming up with titles to my randomicity.

Have I mentioned how much I love the "Universal Wishlist Button" from Amazon? You set it up as a link in your browser's toolbar and when you're on a page of something that you just can't live without (like the Black Bird, Fly camera for example), you press it and this convenient window pops up and you add it to your Amazon wishlist.

I find myself at school with not as much to do as I thought. Not that I don't have a thousand projects I'm working on, instead I seem to have left something critical for each one at home where it can't be put to use. Boo. I think I'm going to have to head home earlier than I thought.

For anyone interested the Undergraduate Art Show starts November 17 and goes through December 5 up here, so come see all the amazingly talented students we have here.

Oh, and for those of you in school. Don't you love when two classes you have to take are scheduled for the exact same time? That's my favorite. The art department seems to be really good at that.

The end.

Just a Reminder

Come to the Print Sale!! If you do you'll be able to see this fantastic chalkboard collab done by Dave Dilworth and Derek Wall.

Frida

Here was my favorite costume from Halloween, my friend Dorthea Brundage.