@karabastard - Tumblr Blog

Just finished this gorgeous figure !

I wanted to make or paint a figure to celebrate the anime release. This took a while to arrive and to paint, so I wasn't able to post it back when episode 1 came out.

I love this pose, and unfortunately I don't like the new Kuji's style, so when I found this beautiful printable model I was instantly hooked.

I tried to replicate Araki's original illustration colors, but I left Johnny's hair blonde and Gyro's accessories and lipstick green.

#so good omg #way better than the new fig fr #jjba sbr

imjunebitch

fuckin succinct

noelle-ism

You’d never know the meaning of unc or its origins in black culture if you looked to mainstream media.

Really good write-up on the origin of "Unc" as a term used in AAVE, and how it's been turned into a generic disparaging term when it didn't even have negative connotations to begin with.

rovensher

kissy kiss

#ough textures goood #sbr #jjba

gutsssee

our lady of victory

16x21in crayon on aluminum

drawn within the fibonacci sequence guidelines

i deeply love sbr and am particularly fascinated with its religious themes

try and spot all the manga easter eggs!

gutsssee

i guess i'll tell the long and tragic tale 💔

so i made this piece as the final for my lithography class. lithography is a printmaking technique originating ~1760, and was highly useful for rapidly copying and distributing written and illustrated works such as newspapers and books (it traveled pretty much wherever europe did, and is one of the only positive cultural fusion effects of colonialism - lots of cultures aquired the process and combined it with their own artistic styles). The process requires some incredibly cool, but sometimes fickle chemistry to pull off the transfer of a drawing into prints.

Several things can be used as the base for drawing, the original material used was slabs of limestone straight from the quarry, but all you need is a surface suitable to capture grease (more on that later), thus I used a sheet of aluminum for this specific piece. The surface requires a specific grain to capture the drawn imagery, so it's important to smoothly sand whatever surface you need. The medium actually used to create imagery can be either a liquid ground or a solid crayon, but the important thing is that the sanded surface will catch and contain any greasy substance. I used an oil crayon to draw this (i had to sharpen it like. one billion times to get the finer lines). So if you zoom in on the image, that's why it has that dotty or grainy texture, it's literally drawn on a sanded grainy surface.

The process gets tricky when you actually go to etch it with acid, and the drawing in its transitive state becomes incredibly delicate. When I first started learning printmaking techniques such as intaglio and lithography, I was confused about what 'etching' actually means: etching is the process of chemically burning your drawn imagery into the material used to print, such as a sheet of metal or a slab of limestone.

So here's where it went wrong. The picture I posted is actually a picture of just the drawing before I had the chance to etch it (and i did digitally color it a little bit) because the plate became completely ruined during the chemical process. Unfortunately.

Before etching, the drawing in grease is literally just sitting on the surface of the grain. Adding nitric acid is what causes those greasy particles to sink down and eat into the aluminum, cementing the drawing microscopically deep into the surface and allowing for many ink reprints of the same image.

The process was going fine so far: I had sealed the drawing with talc so it wouldn't smudge, added the layer of gum arabic (smells really good) as a protectant for the bare aluminum not touched by grease (to keep those spaces un-etched and white), and was rolling my ink onto the plate to complete the etching process. But man, the surface of the glass table used to roll out ink before putting it on the plate had this SLIGHT little divot in it, so much so that the ink was rolling out very unevenly onto the plate and fading part of the linework. So I went to my professor and was like 'hey I think i'm going to wash this ink out and redo it with a flatter surface,' and he said no let me do it for you. Ok. My professor to his credit is an incredible lithographer and has worked countless hours printing people's stuff professionally so they don't have to. So I don't even know what happened. AND NEITHER DOES HE??

Because he takes my plate and is like ok I'm going to do this thing that i've done many times and it works it's just going to clean the plate really fast. And he goes to the off limits cabinet and takes like every goo and potion in there, gum arabic, nitric acid, and like the off-limits lithotine which is like super expensive or something, and just pours it ALL onto my plate... and I stood there and... watched... for like... 4 hours (the whole class period) as he became more and more confused as to why this did not work...

Another fascinating quirk of lithography is that, while adding the greasy ink, the plate must be kept damp with water to protect the unmarked areas of the drawing. This works because the ink is oily and hydrophobic, so if the rest of the plate is wet, the new ink will gravitate to the oily areas and not the watery ones, maintaining the clarity of the etch and drawing.

But this did NOT work on my plate, for some reason. Thus a ton of the areas which were supposed to be clear became also saturated with ink, and the darker areas of the drawing filled in completely. As you can imagine, I was incredibly sick of seeing my print get darker and darker despite trying to take ink off of it. I'm pretty sure this is the longest i'd ever worked on a drawing, at least 40 hours, over a month and a half's worth of coming into the studio at 8pm and leaving at midnight, and all day on weekends.

So I'm very glad I took a picture of it before it was ruined... because i'm very proud of the finished drawing. I wish i could have made better reproductions, but at least I learned my lesson of not putting my whole 😽 into a piece when I'm still learning the process.

If you read to the end here i didn't really tell the story very well and it kind of turned into a lithography walk through, but hopefully it was somewhat interesting. and yeah lol i can see how 'crayon on aluminum' would be a strange ass medium description, but there you go.

Here's some photos of the drawing process:

and finally, here's some colored paper backgrounds I made for it.

aaand here's the final results of the print, you can see how shitty it became:

but yeah! I got a couple good prints before the disaster on newsprint, which is pretty ephemeral material, but I framed one and gave it to my brother for his house so hopefully it'll last a while if he keeps it out of the sun. it's also on a bigger scale than what i've worked with in the past... so it would have been cool if it had worked... but ohhh welllllll it's ok the process was fun and I learned a lot.

Anyway I love sbr and this process scratched the itch of needing to do something incredibly enticing subject-wise but also a deep dive into fine illustrative detail and careful planning, and i think i flexed those muscles to a pretty good degree. It's also good to document the process here!

#fucking incredible #lithography #sbr #jjba

gutsssee

slow dancer and valkyrie

watercolor with digital cleanup

#good good #sbr #jjba

leafy-lilac

guy who speaks to his horse too much

#aaaaaahhhhh #his bby girl :3 #sbr #jjba

orochislayer

Positive affirmations:

I shall cut down all who stand in my way

scottpartridge

Little Blue Heron - the adult is dark grey-blue, and the immature is white.

ot3

i mean this with full straightforward sincerity and not as any kind of backhanded compliment. but i think the most inspiring thing about jojo's bizarre adventure as a collective body of work is that it serves as definitive proof that wholeheartedly committing to your own style, voice, and tastes results in something infinitely more impactful than making something straightforwardly "good".