Inkteraction!

I was recently invited to join the really great Inkteraction site, which was designed as an online community forum for printmakers. It's very inspiring and lively. I like how you can go see what people are up to with their art.

Today I was busy doing the business end of being an artist (hey, is this a bad pun?), you know the boring, but necessary paperwork and I kind of strayed over to the Inkteraction site and it motivated me to get this stuff done faster so I can get back to the fun part of being an artist. It's a friendly place, nice to just cruise around, kind of like peeking in a studio door... check it out. Here is Melanie Yazzie's page! I had the honor of learning a few printmaking techniques from her when she was a visiting professor at Boise State a couple of years ago. Lucky us!

Jill Fitterer, Cerisse Palalagi, Maxx Stevens, John Hitchcock, and Candace Nicol have pages there, as do so many other really great printmakers. Of course, Jill is a wonderful colleague here at BSU (the coolest initials in all of academia, by the way) who teaches Printmaking.

Just the other day I was telling my own digital photography students that they should take printmaking classes after they take my class, because so many of the creative challenges are so similar. I think that when you go from something like Photoshop into printmaking, some very cool things happen that are more fluid and tactile than what you can get from a digital printer. It seems that the hand-work, presses, paper and inks throw in some very magical elements to the creative process that you just can't get any other way.