@utilitybiscuits / utilitybiscuits.tumblr.com
it's been in my header for a minute but! this has been my digital art sideblog which i've kept separate from my main work/job in printmaking & letterpress—
The reasons for doing that are fading, and also i'm combining the digital work & illustration i did here with printmaking more and more lately, so there's not much point in the separation anymore i don't think. These posts stay up, but all future stuff, digital or combination, will be posted @cyclesprefectpress :)
i am of course Extremely Gay for madam/sir/??¿ knives-for-hands but also my main criteria for drawing fanart at this point is, can i reasonably put them in a very loud suit y/n?
(i do have a queue of other characters in mind and am also very easily persuaded to design more loud patterns so, uuuh, if you throw it out i might pick it up)
“Perhaps the vocabulary is more urgent than usual, but then again the house is on fire.”
Quote by poet & essayist Martín Espada; linoleum block by Hap Bockelie.
My mother printed these with Hap several years ago and I’ve never forgotten its texture and its letter shapes. I’ve been thinking about it all day.
If I ever work on only one project at a time i’ll Die, you can’t make me
Improvements! Definitely the smoothest this pattern-printing-through-a-mask thing has gone. Still can’t turn on the motor, which I’m learning to cope with, and can’t get rid of the embossing-ish pinch between the mask and the backing, which I’m learning to like. Overall, fastest & most painless attempt yet! Progress.
Please don’t ask me why I’m repeatedly compelled to do this....weird and very superfluous thing. If I didn’t know before I certainly don’t now, stuck at home and looking for challenges to tackle.
these were not the npcs next on my list to draw but then one of my players wanted to date Stola (right, the town blacksmith, why was i surprised) so they jumped the queue!
her half brother Burnka on the left, ranger/cartographer, who was social distancing by mayoral mandate before it was cool, by which i mean, he made some Reckless Choices and the party caught him at it so he’s since been under house arrest for his own health
hello internet, this is Wicker, though that is not the name she gives to nearly anybody anymore, it’s become a secret—
she’s a tiefling, she’s a sweetie until she is suddenly not, and she’s also wearing both a pair of shoes and a textile that I want VERY much to own myself, PHOOEY
🎉🎉🎉🎉 December holidays means my sister was home juuuuust long enough to get a linoleum block carved & printed! And this beauty’s a dogwood, for Perseverance, which feels right for the new year.
Sure, the horns are a trophy of Hetr’s first kill in the Games, but being fair to him they were left to the victor in the loser’s will. (The Games aren’t technically duels to the death, but it definitely does happen anyway. Best to have a plan for it.)
pinning down some later antagonists for my campaign and, no spoilers, but I think my players probably already know that I like my women buff, fashion-conscious, and full of disdain for human life, so. Brae’s whole deal probably will not come as a surprise to them.
shem & dala & juma, when they were all still speaking to each other, were less a power thruple and more an imbroglio of limbs so closely twined they came around the other side to work at cross-purposes—limbs that were unfortunately also imbued with divine strength & powers. hard to extract without bruising, shall we say.
in pUBLIC— About the only thing they have in common is that they’re both completely unselfconscious.
(ive messed about with a couple different methods but at this point I have to admit it’s just faster for me to THINK about colors as a multi-plate process, even if it’s a weird way to use the digital tools. I am also doing Inktober but I’m taking it less to-the-letter than last year. tbh I’ve been re-weighing my balance between printmaking and strictly drawing projects lately, which isn’t bad I don’t think! but it does mean im very used to working slowly these days, chipping away at a thing and walking away, and I need quite a bit of time to warm up to drawing people when I return to it. anyway week one has mostly been timed sketching! super refreshing. I may get into longer pen drawings later & dump better sketches in a pile.)
finished this little edition of 8 accordion books just in time to take them to a Wayzgoose in Bremerton! two in each color of cover.
full guts up here, which I drew uuuuuh a while ago, and made into an singular accordion, poorly, so! very glad to have a chance to do it much better this time. digitally printed pages, hand-breyered black backs, book boards wrapped in Masa rice paper & letterpress printed in two colors with a matching pair of Linotype slugs. finished size 3 ¾ x 3 ¼ in., packed in business card boxes.
Got commissioned to do a small edition of wood block prints a few weeks ago and!! It was VERY nice to work on something this purely printmaking, I do not get paid to do that very often.
Digital sketch, carbon paper transfer, yellow highlight hand-inked with an ink ball
Got a proof & another proof! And the rest of my paper, GOSH do it feel good on the surface, can’t wait to hit it with lead
Did a bunch of math, made some educated guesses, and at a certain point you just gotta set the type and see if you’re going to run out of room or not and I am NOT! Great. Amazing. Stellar.
Haven’t proofed it yet so there’s def some typos but mostly I’m hoping my edition of Good Omens doesn’t have any errors in these first few pages?? Probably not. I’m sure it’s fine.
words and clothes, those are the only two things I know how to do
good evening, I am here to mark the stage at which I said nnaAAAAAH to any kind of historical accuracy in their clothing
OK we’re learning!! Tried again to do digital for lineart and some colors, supplemented with letterpress printing for border & text & the pattern on his shirt.
better in the sense of, uh, I mean giving Satya a very good dress is always time well spent but I thought about it and really what I’m trying to learn is to—not necessarily illustrate events but to amplify the meaning of text with illustration, efficiently. so I went through Hanzo’s voice lines and said well which of these bytes is an efficient encapsulation of his character to me, and how can I present it as a complete idea without sequential parts, and I sure hope I achieved some of that too because—
I also fixed a bunch of technical issues! I handset the pattern on his shirt and printed that in two colors through a frisket on a C&P, and I made the frisket a lot cleaner this time, more reliable, so I didn’t lose any sheets for dumb reasons. So far there’s really no way to do this with the motor of the press turned on unfortunately, so it’s still a really small run—I’ve got ~38 I think.
Also handset the gold border with rule & decorative pieces; DeVinne Condensed for the text. just LOOK at that G!! what a good font.
tbh I…don’t know what the intended market for this is supposed to be, it’s sort of a niche intersection of interests but. I do have ~38 of these, they’re 6 x 8.75 printed on very nice warm white Neenah cotton paper, I think it was 90 lb. Message me if you want a sad guy with shiny gold accents!
