The Principles of Design

This week's episode is about block printing. For the history segment, I talked a bit about Katsushika Hokusai, a Japanese woodblock printer in the 19th century, and I interviewed Speedball Art Products to learn about modern materials and methods. To learn more about Speedball, check out their website: https://www.speedballart.com/

This week's episode is about photography. While numerous scientists were conducting experiments with light sensitive materials as early as the 18th century, it was Daguerre in the middle of the 19th century who really advanced the medium. He wasn't the first photographer, but he innovated coming up with a practical method and sharing it with the world so others could build off his process and improve it further. Daguerre was also among the first to recognize photography as an art form and not just a science. In the early days, photographs would require long exposure times. As a result moving subjects couldn't be caught on film, but in 1838, Daguerre pointed his camera to the street outside his window. A man was having his boots polished and just happened to stand still long enough so that he and the person polishing his boots would become the first people captured in a photo. This week my guest was Matt Stoeffel from Kodak. He shared tremendous insights into how black and white as well as color film worked, and how our digital cameras process images.

In this episode, I share a little bit of the history of how film developed with early pioneers of motion pictures. For my interview, I spoke with Stefanie Hubbard, an independent film producer and owner of Pure Magic Pictures. Check out Pure Magic Pictures:

There are all sorts of different papers out there from standard construction paper to fine art papers. Learn a little bit of history how paper was developed centuries ago, how different papers are made today and what to look for in selecting the right papers for your art.

Andy Warhol famously said that he wanted to be like a machine producing artworks in his factory studio. The irony is of course he played with colors and exposures, leaning in to the imperfections of an over exposed image or printing without perfectly aligning his screens. He put a human touch into the mechanical process elevating pop culture subjects to the realm of fine art. In this episode, I spoke with Melissa Sorenson from Speedball Art Materials to learn how screen printing works. She shared some insights into how the materials are produced and how we can make the most of them in our studios. To learn more about Speedball, check out their website: https://www.speedballart.com/