Pizza Study
Pizza has been a running theme in my art (and my life). It's portable, yummy, and arrives in simple shapes that a timid artist can emulate. I generally like goopy-feeling lines and drop shapes, so the melty cheese aesthetic really seemed to draw me in. Delicious and inspirational? Pizza didn't need more reasons to be wonderful, but here we are.
This page in particular breaks down how one cheesy, gooey slice of pizza has stayed with me through my explorations in various mediums and print making.
When I started getting comfortable using ink, I'd fill each page. I'd fill in space with whatever felt right or there was room for. Even if there wasn't room, a line or some dots were going in there.
I knew I wanted to make stuff, but had not exercised those muscles in so long that I just drew the shapes around me, even if I didn't feel confident in getting every detail right.
As we were discussing dinner options one night, I clearly had something on my mind. The pizza can be found in the top right, next to a skyline of sorts.
I foind I kept kind of trying to "fix" the pizza slice in later doodles, or I was just thinking about pizza a lot.
When the time came that I started to explore block printing and linoleum block carving, the topic was easy for me to decide.
I can pretend there was something about the form or something, but you may ahve guessed by now, I just really like pizza. So I decided to make a pizza stamp.
To this point, I'd mostly drawn very tiny lines on 5x7inch notebook pages. As a slice needed to fit the 4x6inch block, a new sketch was needed. All that pratice drawing some pizzas paid off to get the cheese goop just right.
I didn't account for how crumbly the linoleum could get if I wasn't watching what I was doing. I hadn't carved before and didn't know what to expect, really. I had some ambitious ideas about how the pepperoni should be filled in, and accidentally took too much out. I moved to an outline, instead.
Initial prints are a success, though, and I am enamored with my ability to stamp literally whatever I want with a melty slice.
For legal reasons, I can't just do that :(
I dabbled around with art supplies some more before I eventually got myself in front of a screen. I had been playing with the idea of surface prints (which eventually lead to my Society6 opening up) and mirroring some old doodles together, however was probably a bit hungry when deciding to try my hand at a pattern that could line up seamlessly without just mirroring them together.
Though I was able to get some pleasing designs over various products with just mirroring or rotating items, I just didn't feel that was all the pizza needed to be. Clearly this food is very important, and needs to be treated as such.
When trying new things and processes, I tend to stick with art topics I am most comfortable with. I challenged myself by using Affinity Designer to create the pattern, which I hadn't tried before.
You know what? Pizza never fails to deliver. With new knowledge and experiments at my disposal, I revisited carving a pattern into linoleum.
I liked the idea of having more pizza slices to stamp on things at a time, and why, I already had a design with a bunch of slices! I had a more realistic approach to the pepperoni on this scale and allowing the negative space to be details. The initial carving was promising, however seemed a bit empty.
I considered re-visiting the pattern just to fill in space and make the seamless pattern line the 4x6 form of the tile rather than just a portion of the original square, but decided that maybe I could figure out a way to fill the space without crowding it too much.
I decided on a watercolor background instead of a colored page. This allowed me to play with a lazy susan to get nice circles, and test out some new watercolor palettes. Using tape allowed me to keep nice, neat edges in something that was sort of messy and experimental.
Some frames from etsy were sanded down and painted to match using black gesso and acrylic. A pane of glass truly brought it all together.
I am looking forward to seeing where pizza takes me next. It's helped me feel more comfortable trying new mediums and forms of expression, as well as feeling more confident when approaching a potential project. I'm a better artist because of it.
Just be sure to appreciate the pizza in your life, folks.