first set of screenprints!
First actual set of prints pulled! Just as the weather was getting a wee bit too cold. I can't wait for spring and more screen printy goodness. After all that rigamaroll, it's a good thing I enjoy it.
Booyah bitches!
Look! Looklooklooklook!
In zee studio! Still bumpy, but functional!
and: cold as tits.
more screenprinting: zines: no illustration to be seen.
Finally returning to my old habit of keeping this blog well maintained and topical, although it's so much more I'm Sorry You Can't Really Can't See or Participate In This Unless You Live In Toronto Type Content then the Pure, Unadulterated Drawings Of Weird Crap one would expect from me. I'm sorry about that. I do have pictures, I draw them and everything, still, but while the sadly neglected animation set takes up my studio, my scannner has been relocated to the projects. (Projects, in this case, is the shelf where I keep my art supplies, too far from the USB ports on my computer to maintain that sort of intimate, every day relationship they both so desire.) Plus, many of the images I've made over the last year ended up being put in zines instead of on the internet.
I have news on that front, though! I am reprinting many of the zines I spammed the world with at TCAF. So far I've reprinted Scared of Skin Sack & the Whole Human Meat Mess, which in the following illumination is the one of the top left:
I think since TCAF I've may have drawn enough other pictures on the same theme to make a sequel. 
So I may have one new zine available, and I'm still humming and hawing about combining the orange and grey ones into one tiny mega-zine, since they're not all that thematically dissimilar. (The next time I start a band I'm going to call it The Thematically Dissimilar. Rolls off the tongue.)
Why, you're very kind to show such an interest! (I sound like an infomercial lately. Alienating the audience. Eek.) Well, for one, you can always e-mail me and maybe I can mail them to you, old fashioned like, because mail is cool and I hear they're delivering it now. Or, you can show up at Zine Dream at the Tranzac club on August the 21st, where Kat Verhoeven and I will have a little table dishing our wares.
To get to the point, about there being drawings in this blog, I am going to post one of the short comics available in Scared of Skin Sack here after Zine Dream, as well as a few other illustrations from the zines, I think. I am also thinking I should name my next zine something a little less gross. That's what I was going for, but titles, man. They live longer than content a lot of the time.
Thunderbird Studio on Indie Go Go, for those who are just tuning in, is going really, really well. As of this post, we've raised over half our goal already. I am excited to turn this fundraising into art. On a personal note, I have been so busy lately with ambitious film-like, studio-production-house real-job prove-yourself-as-professional type heaviness. I am really grateful that I have this screen printing studio project, and things like zines and friends that keep me making art for arts sake, and making sure a good part of my skillset it still going towards expressing myself and being an artist and all those silly childish pursuits they try to scrub out of you in college. Thank goodness!
This post has too many commas and not enough pictures.
a variety of applications of the same ideology.
I have a lot of things to catch you up on today, but first: one of the few images I've made lately that isn't intended to be cannibalized into something larger than itself, except my general confusion about how the hell cynical old me managed to find herself in a thriving, respectful, silly-ness driven romantic and creative relationship when so many of my cohorts for some reason feel like they need to settle with people who make them feel like they are being slowly lobotomized.
I have been EXTREMELY busy this summer, which always hits me like a pile of bricks. I keep myself busy through the winter but forget how many opportunities rain from the sky when the whether warms up.
Like the song says. It went from hovel to useful space over the course of a few weeks thanks pretty much entirely due to the construction skills and insight of JJ Tebrake and Misha Snyder. The ghost pictured above is illustrator Erin Ornstein, who is, in fact, a ghost lately, in that I do not see her nearly as much as I should in person and who really needs to be putting more of her stuff on the interwebs.
So far the studio is pretty much set to go, if we get our screens exposed elsewhere, but we are ambitious types and have dreams of building our own on-site exposure unit. We don't have the funds collected to complete it yet, but this past weekend we gave it a run through anyway with the materials we did have: christmas lights in the place of a uv safe light, fluorescents rather than blacklights, bits of random stuff we had lying around to cover it, and a chunk of slightly tinted coffee-table glass we found on the side of the road. (Eventually we're going to find a good price on a chunk of 2'x4' plexiglass.) Our images exposed but a lot of the detail was lost, . It was a crap-ton-o-fun. (For serious!) With a little more money and experimentation we will master it! The picture above is JJ, Kat Verhoeven and I, lurking over our in-progress exposure unit, which seemed to get more ghetto as which realized how many supplies we were short. (That's why you do a run-through, right?)
We've already got an awesome handful of artists contributing to the studio, but we're hoping to meet some cool people through it, other illustrators and artists looking to do some screen printing in a space that's nice and big and well-ventilated! If you're looking to do some screen printing this summer, you should contact any of the people mentioned in this here blog post (myself included) to let us know you're interested!
All the details were lost of these when we exposed them but I'm keeping them for the next experiment. That type was a lot of fun and I'm pretty sure is going to look amazing printed. I love type. Type type type. These were made by painting in thick, thick ink directly on acetate. I didn't get a picture of Kat's but she did hers on rubylith, which I am EXCITED to try at the next opportunity. But the straight ink on acetate has a wonderful quality, the ink clings to it so beautifully, and I hope someday when I get through my already ridiculous list of projects I want to do i get a chance to experiment doing some shadow puppet animation playing with bending acetate and filming the shadows.
Dear other multimedia artists out there: if you decided you're going to produce a stop motion animation, do it in the winter. Especially if you don't have air conditioning. You can't have windows open or a fan blowing when working with a medium that registers to slightest movement shifts. Stick to digital animation for the season so you can work on your laptop in some crispy coffee shop.
I HAVE LEARNED THINGS. Growing as a person right here. (I am going to finish this animation if it takes me all year.)
Misha and I went for another Drawn Dinner, you can see Kat's review of the Toronto restaurant WVRST. Which was amazing, in my own words, and I hope to go to again Trevor is threatening hosting his next birthday there. Fingers crossed!
Also at that dinner was Jenn Woodall, an artist I lived with for a while and have had the wonderful chance lately to work with more closely lately. She's been extremely lovely in introducing me to the wonderful world of the live-action film industry. And I wanted to link her website again because I recently updated it to wordpress.
So that all is a bare, hobby-shaped morsel of what I've been working on this summer so far! There's a lot more: collaborating on web design with a trio of talented humans, sticking my thumbs into as many independent film pies as possible, madly canvassing for an internship which seems like it's looking to go my way real soon. (I am really hoping this will make my resume and my general brainset settle from "Brave Wanderer" to "Focused Multimedia Enthusiast.") I have some hilarious stories from a few jobs I've applied for showcasing the, uh, interesting personalities who advertise for free help on craigslist. It wouldn't be professional to gossip about it online, but let me tell you this creative professional business has some characters. (Luckily, many of these characters are fifty-seven shades of awesome. I have met more people that I want to keep knowing in the past two months than I have in the last four years.)
I was going to include in this post a list of all the films I've worked on this summer that aren't mine, but as they're all being produced with the intention of being submitted in festivals I don't want to mess anything up for anyone by "leaking" things about them online. Oh well. They were all awesome and you should go out of your way to watch every one of them.
ETA: We now have an Indie Go Go fundraising platform (as well as a name!) for our screen printing studio. Check it out! Every little bit helps!
Naked No More
Close-up of Previously Naked Guy
A lot has changed on set since last we met! This guy has pants. And a new tripod, and a new rig for the speechbubble, and the gravestone has a makeover. If you were on my twitter or facebook fanpage you also saw this after-set-construction-but-before-final-costuming progress shot. I am hoping to finish principal photography on this project by the end of July, so I can have my studio back to do... pretty much anything else. I've got some illustration projects I want to do, and I want to make another comic for Zine Dream in August.
I am realizing a lot lately that I really need to make friends with a musician. I am entirely un-musical, but I'm always making these films with no dialogue and I know they need a soundtrack but no music is perfect and I could fart around in garage band and come up with some chords that might sound like they go together, but I should really be finding someone with a lot more talent than I but a similar sense of aesthetics so we can collaborate. I tried doing this a few years ago with a friend of mine, but she was overseas and it just became very complicated and disintegrated. I think I need someone I can sit down at a piano or violin or whatever with. Do you like ghost stories and stuff that looks like it's made out of bits of trash? Do you make music to match? Any Toronto Atmospheric Composers wanna get a drink with me sometime? (That is the preferred term, right?)
oh, no one told me about her.
A few months ago Meg Hunt was talking on her twitter about her new Masquepen, which put iwhich put in my head to try it. I saw the brand she mentioned in the shop but decided to pass at the time because it was like $20 I didn't have at the time. This week I found these little bottles at Curry's for like $3, they're pretty much just little squeeze bottles with what looks like the tip from a mechanical pencil shoved unceremoniously on the top. It's great! There's three in a package, I've got one with white ink and one with masking fluid.
I'm hanging out at home today playing with actual paint. Feels so nice, I feel like I've been staring at a computer screen for weeks: when not programming websites I'm watching the Wire. My eyes are sore. Even typing up this entry is hurting me.
And I realize I never showed off my finished books here! Here they are, all four of them:
They are all gone now! (Save one of each for my "records".) I went around and handed them out to people at TCAF. I even sold a few! Funds that immediately went back into comics. I am not sure if having something to give to people made me more nervous or less nervous. I was definitely a spaz for the first half of Saturday. I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out. I like seeing my work in print so much more than on the internet. 
And: I just discovered that the Zombies are a band, that they made some songs I was already familiar with and loved and every once in a while would go "Oh my goodness I do like this song!", and that they have a bunch of OTHER songs I DIDN'T know but now I like.
misha’s magical mobile.
Someone on twitter mentioned mobile-making, and I remembered I never put the one I made on the internet. I intend to make SO MANY MORE. This particular one has no plot, it was an experiment I made for my boyfriend for his birthday. But I think they're an awesome medium from non-linear story-telling and I really want to experiment more with that!
Making this creature was very memorable, for one because for one I'd never made a mobile before, but also because it was the very first piece of artwork I made after the house fire I had last summer. I sublet my boyfriends roommates bedroom while the roommate was out of town, so I could spread what was left of my smokey, soggy belongings across it without putting anyone in any respiratory danger. (Okay, those belongings being %90 artwork and DVD covers...) Which conveniently gave me some privacy from him for this secret project, since we were unexpectedly sharing a single room living situation.
But also emorable because I think this project was the first time in the history of my entire life that I had to go out and buy every single tool and material necessary. In takes way more planning.
The humans are Misha and I. I'm especially proud of the rabbits, which I unfortunately could not get a very good picture of.
Next one I make I'm going to have been extension wires than embroidery thread.
a little less two dimension, a little more… three dimensions.
I saw audrey kawasaki's felt dolls when I was thinking about my friend Jenn Woodall, who makes these insanely awesome geek plushies (as gifts, in additional to her insane costuming workload...) and who's birthday was coming up. My idea was to try and make her a tiny Jenn-Clone Sewing Slave, although I think that intention got buried since I decided I didn't what to have it holding anything sharp. I suppose she could stick it full of pins if she so desires. That's helpful, right?
I also make other things! Look, I made this iPod Protection Screen out of packing tape and some bits of plastic I found in the road. (I am a dishwasher at a culinary center. It gets wet, and we recently upgraded our barely-functioning radio for somebodies fancy-ass iPod dock.)
One of my coworkers at the culinary center is crazy for chocolate milk, so occassionally my boss orders it for us and it comes in these huge unweidly boxes that I guess are intended for some kind of dispenser.
This is the greatest piece of art I have ever created. My coworker said it's a little disconcerting to be drinking chocolate milk out of something with a face, but really, it was someone else who made it worse... when gravity began to work against it they had to flip the box over, and now they're drinking chocolate milk out of a dead elephant. (In that an elephant is actually a really complicated land-fish, and that all fish end up belly to the sky someday.)
Hey, did you know I got a twitter? You can add me at @gblekkenhorst. I've actually had one for a while now, but i didn't, like, GET it until I got a smart phone. I've rediscovered the joys I thought I lost when I finally crawled from the basement, wheezing to step into the sunlight of participating with the human race! Now I can constantly be hitting the REFRESH button while out on the town.
Oh, yes: because of my recent twitter obsession, you'll notice all the pages on the blog now have "tweet this" under them, and if you're one of my four VERY lucky twitter followers, you may have followed me here from you twitter feed! Ooo, I have the shivers.