More Hand Adventures: An Orangutan-Based Case Study

Last year I hit upon the idea of doing a painting based on the four-color print process, whereby dots of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) are printed in a pattern called a rosette to give you pictures in magazines and such.


C,M,Y, and K plates forming a rosette (from ippaper.com)

Naturally, my thoughts were to make a picture of one of our primate friends; in this case, an orangutan. One of my concerns was how to make a picture like this interesting up close. I knew that the dots would resolve into a picture at a distance (in the case of the show it ended up in, across Guerrero street, a good 60 feet) but wanted to give the looker-at-er some detail to look at if they were a foot away and passing it on the way to the bathroom.

I ended up thinning the paint to be pretty transparent (like the inks used in printing), and letting the dots be not perfectly round. Two thousand-ish scribbly little dots later, I had an orangutan:


Pongo.jpg

Made of lots and lots of dots:


PongoDetail.jpg

It was pretty successful, I think. I guess people like pictures that are like puzzles, like those eye-straining cross-your-eyes-and-see-the-boat prints you see at the mall (cf. Mallrats). I was happy because unlike my sharp-edged might-as-well-be-silkscreens, up close you could see the endless scribbling that went into it. This summer, I may finally get to the idea I've had of doing a picture with this process huge, using a hollow wood door as a canvas. A mini-billboard, El Rey style.