Kobe Ahrens
Japanese Stab Bound Zine
This is my Japanese stab bound Zine. A Zine is a little booklet of drawings or other such peaces that are art. All these pieces are combined into one book. My zine is about swimming and how to do the strokes. At the end I also add a picture of the start (jumping off the block) and I also added a picture of the celebration after winning the race, or doing good. I share a good connection to swimming because I am on the Bettendorf high school swim team. The beautiful thing about a zine I learned is they are not defined by the words you right, a zine of someone crying could be read as sad or someone could read it as a mom with the child she just gave birth to and crying with joy. I learned how to bind a book which is a really cool skill to know as well.
Dry point etching project
Ruby is the dog I based my project off of. The etching involved us tracing a picture of Ruby on to a piece of plastic, we then used the plastic to print out multiple copy's of the the etching. Then I painted it, well I painted it twice because the first time it sucked ass. I wanted to do Ruby because it was a funny picture and since she recently passed away I believed it would make my friend feel very good if I gave him some of the copy's.
Lino Cut - Self Portrait
First thing I did for this project was find a picture of myself that looked decent enough to do a portrait of, the only problem is that I was shirtless. I solved this problem by cropping my shirt i was wearing off my body and pasting it on my shirtless pic, the result was a picture of me in a shirt and it worked great. Ms. Arter then printed the picture out and then I traced it onto paper, I then traced the paper with charcoal onto the lino. We then carved the lino and proceeded to paint the lino than press paper onto it to make different pictures. I tried many different varieties of colors to come out with cool looking pictures and I am very satisfied with the outcome. My favorite part of the project was carving the lines out of the lino because it was very satisfying and fun although I was continuously yelled at for cutting towards me.
Silk-Screen Printing
We started out on this project by making multiple individual designs, Ethan made a space cup pouring out water over a shirt, my design was a multicolored tree, and Kassidy's was a bunch of shapes. We ended up choosing Ethan's design. From then on we transferred it to a see through paper and then placed it on a large screen between a wooden frame. After we put it put the paper on the screen we painted it covered it up with a black blanket and used blue light to burn our see through picture onto it. We then placed the shirt over the frame and painted over the frame and it created a cool design on the shirt. My favorite part of the project was the large group work and being able to work with my friends. I learned how to burn things with blue light during the project.
Mono Print
Mono printing is a type of art that involves using a gel pad and pressing various shapes into a paper after painting the pad. This creates a sort of collage type of design. When I did my prints I used an analogous color scheme. I used blue green, blue violet, and Red violet colors because they were unique and not many people used those color schemes. My shapes were geometric and consisted of a circle, rectangles, squares and right triangles. I choose those shapes because I wanted a symmetrical looking picture. The finished project didn't look the way I expected but I ended up liking the look, I believe my picture looks unique and although its not perfectly lined up I believe this adds a certain charm to the picture no one can replicate.
Block Printing
Block printing is very complicated. The first step was picking a design. I choose this cool star design because with 3 stars on the top and bottom. I liked this design because it was symmetrical and I believed it would look good when printed multiple times next to each other. I then drew the design on paper. After I drew the design I shaded the back of the paper and traced the lines of my drawing to move it on to the block. After the lines were moved onto the block I liked the way it looked so I started carving it out on the block. Once it was carved and I was satisfied with it I painted it and pressed it down on the paper, I used different colors because I believed it would look cooler with different colored squares rather than doing the same color on the squares. I am satisfied with my project, and if i could do it again I would make the stars look neater.