New Line Test

I have made a new line test template. This one is much more precise, and gives me a better example of exactly when a engraved line fails. I made it to show also the point of failure for "white lines"- the lines of stone not engraved.

click to view larger image

I will have this available soon for download via pdf and dxf.

Roaring Fork Meadows

I had to make an early exit to my fishing trip. I have a foot injury that I have to watch. I was able to hike a good six miles, the scenery was incredible, I cooked the perfect sirloin steak on a slab of granite in the middle of the fire. It was some nice R&R. Most of all I had time to think. Actually my favorite time to hike is in the middle of the night. I can see how most people are spooked by being in the forest at night, but for me it was really peaceful. For some reason when I walk late at night I get a lot of thinking done.

Roaring Fork. Mountain streams have the clearest water.

After hiking a few miles through a thicket of lodgepoles, I always get excited as I approach a clearing.

Cocoa. He wanted to jump in the lake, but decided that from 10 feet, it was a little too high.

This photo is for my Mother-in-law. She always teases me when I don't catch anything...which is often. Take that Barb.

The next day I went to the Sweetwater River. No luck. Some places you have to fly fish...at Sweetwater the fish were jumping like crazy....some sort of green caddis. They were not interested in my lures.

I was actually hoping to catch some bigger fish to photograph and study for making graphics. The fish were just too small. For some reason they don't grow that much at high altitudes. 

Fishing Trip

I will be on a fishing trip the week of July 25th.

A major monument convention is happening this weekend in Cody Wyoming. So we are postponing the engravings until next week. I figured now would be a good time to get in a little fishing trip. Still send me an email if you need anything, and I will get back to you asap.

See you back on the 1st of August.

Lee

Progress in Optical Mixing

This is not finished. It shows promise for value, I just need to combine that with the clarity of important features such as the eyes, etc. But it shows promise.

This may not look like much. But it indicates a serious breakthrough. The problem with designing stencils with contour lines is that you can do incredible detail at large sizes like 15" by 20". But I want to make this technology available in smaller formats. This image here(my little kadiebug) can be etched at 7" tall by 3.5" wide, and still be safe. This is a rough image...it is not fully processed, but you can see that the angled contour lines give a great deal of information with very little mark making. This is key. This is where its at. The outline needs to be processes separately and then overlay-ed.

Now this one is really nice, but it has to be etched at a minimum of 20" tall in order for line widths to stay in a safe area(1/16"-3/32" or above.

There have been many artists that have experimented with optical mixing, both with color and value. The synthesis of value occurs within the brain as opposed to on the medium you are looking at. Case in point: the white of your computer screen is not really white, but a combination of red, green, and blue diodes placed next to each other.

My work continues. My goal is to balance subtle optical value with clarity of defining features. Stay posted!

Life is what it is.

This is an exciting time for me. I am contacting different business and learning more about the graphics trade.

One thing I can tell you- I care about feedback. It won't hurt, either, I promise (Eight years of art critiques in art school gave me some tough skin) But I also know that input-and especially the kind you are not the most excited to hear-is the kind you can benefit from most. I will not lie to you. I know what I do, and I do what I do well. But I am trained as an artist. I know that there is nothing that compares to the wisdom of experience, and many of you that I am working with out there have been in the monument industry for years. There are many things that I have yet to learn. My success as a graphic designer is contingent on my ability to learn from you.

That being said, sometimes coming from another discipline can offer some fresh perspective. I did lithography in grad school. Lithography put me through the ringer on more than one occasion. It is the hardest medium I have done to date, and will probably be the hardest medium I will ever face. There were so many variables. There was the chemical composition of the limestone. Every stone was different. Then there was the grit you applied with a levigator. You applied three different grits, 80, 180, and 240. You had to do it for the right amount of time. Then you poured an bath of glacial acidic acid diluted to 5% onto the stone and let it set for 2 minutes. You brush the stone back and forth with a sponge to circulate the acid and allow for the reactive acid on the top to replace the stabilized acid nearest to the stone. At this point the stone is ready to accept your drawing. There are hundreds of different materials you can apply to limestone- Touche, Litho crayon, spraypaint, anything that has grease content. Once your drawing is complete you cover the drawing with talc and rosin powder before you apply the gum arabic. You have to put just the right amount of the powder in even distribution or the the gum arabic will not etch evenly. Then you apply the gum arabic. You have to know your grease. If you have a lot of grease, you add 7-14 drops of nitric acid to your gum arabic. This will make it etch "hotter." Too cold of an etch will make the image not appear. Too hot an etch will make everything turn black. After your etch is dry, you pull out the litho ink and add varnish. It has to be at the right tact, or consistency. You take turns loading a roller with the ink and then rolling the ink onto the stone. An aid assists you in keeping the stone wet. The stone must remain wet in order for the clean parts of the stone to repel ink and for the greasy parts to accept it. You run a proof. You have to run it a the right pressure. You have a pressure bar that you have to keep lubricated. If you do all of this perfectly you get a good image.

Headache yet? Here is my favorite piece: I started etching at 9pm and did not finish it until 11 am the next morning:

Now why did I go into all this?  Two reasons. One I wanted to illustrate that I understand what it takes to get something right. I don't cut corners. I work until it is right. The second reason is that I have learned some age-old techniques that I see being very applicable to stencil sandblasting on granite.

One of these techniques is intaglio engraving. Intaglio goes way back to the 15th century. Dutch artist and anatomist Bernhard Siegfried Albinus was one of these artists. Check out one of his engravings. Be sure to click on it and look at it up close!

Albinus used contour lines to create the illusion of depth. It is incredible craftsmanship. I want to apply the same technique to granite engraving. The girl at the top of this post is how far I have come on research. If the lines are done right, the will allow for great detail and value, all the while keeping drawings simple and line widths greater than 1/16".

I have been doing line tests and other research. I believe contour imaging will work. Next week I go to engrave the creation of adam with the same technique:

I have worked hard and watched closely to keep line widths over 1/16th of an inch. This is incredible detail for granite. Of course there are limitations. But IF you know those limitations, you will be able to take them to the limit. For this reason I am going to be producing a second, more arduous line test so that you can know exactly what your equipment can and can't do. I will continue to make standard two-tone graphics, and quality ones at that, but this is what I am really passionate about. Stay posted!

qhgraphics open for business!

As of today Quality Headstone Graphics is open for business.

Our vector catalog is a work in progress. Our goal is to have 1000 graphics by 2012.
For the time being, any graphic that you need can be ordered in the custom imagery section.

I care a great deal about quality and craftsmanship. If you have any feedback, feel free to contact us through qhgraphics.com!

Thank you for giving us a chance to make graphics for your clients!

Sincerely,

Michael L. Crook, Owner, Quality Headstone Graphics

Why I do it.

I went to school to become and art teacher. I studied painting, drawing, and lithography.
Here are some images of my thesis exhibition in 2010.

This work is very dear to me, and I hope to one day make art on a more regular bases. It is different, that is for sure, but I love it. Two years into grad school and I was deeply involved with traditional painting, and learning the traditions of the masters. I was even using some of the old recipes for bleaching linseed oil, pulverizing iron(II) oxide, mixing my own paint, and everything. I have the deepest respect for the old masters: Vermeer, Rembrandt, Bouguereau, Bloch, Hoffman, Ingres.

The deeper I became involved with this research, the more the ethereal mystere of the old masters disappeared. These artists did not worship themselves as we worship them today. For the most part, these artists were simply using the materials available to them at their time to excel in their craft.

There is a lot that is wrong with art today. There is so much emphasis on the genius of the individual. It is in many ways just another route to establishing celebrity status. It is a game that is played. Just wiki the artist Damien Hirst if you want to know what I am talking about.

During grad school I became absolutely fascinated with iconography and how the human mind is able to process imagery and respond so quickly. This is why I like headstone imagery. It is deceptively simple. Some people are over sandblasting, thinking that photo-realism is the future. But this will not be the case. We as humans have always drawn heavily on abstract iconography, and we have a visual iconographic language that rivals the largest supercomputer in terms of complexity.

I find this role to be especially significant in our day. In Rembrandt's era, iconography was not as advanced, and their was a great deal of room to add visual terminology to the language. Today is much different however. With instant global communication we are bombarded with imagery. We are drowning in it. There is and will always be the Da Vinci's and Michelangelo's that create new and exciting visual language, but for every one of them, we need artists that make sense of societies visual language. This is where I find my place. I love designing headstone graphics because of its simplicity. It sits outside of the torrent of visual overload. A cemetery is a beautiful place. It is a gallery wherein we use our skills to represent some of the most important ideas in our lives: our relationships with our loved ones. The lack of interest in headstone imagery is indicative of the sickness of modern art academia. What is the training of the humanities for if not for serving our fellow man? We have become so caught up in self-actualization that we have forgotten the value of serving selflessly. When I design headstone graphics, I put my heart into it. I push myself to take the imagery to a level that it has never been before. But I don't have to put my name on it. When someone looks at an image etched into granite, they don't have to know anything about my "creative genius:" they can simply enjoy the image for its simple nature of purpose: to invoke feeling within the viewer. This is art.

My desire has always been to take the knowledge I gained in the academic world and bring it back to reality, to use my skills to make the lives of those around me a little better. These people are often simple and unsophisticated in the eyes of the world, but it is these people that are real and true.

There may be a day when I return to making fine art. For the time being, I am very happy with my business, designing graphics for monument companies.