Traveling Time

This is an intaglio print. It's a piece of plexiglass that I cut down to 5x7 inches and scratched into with an Xacto knife.

The trick is that you have to etch the image in mirror form, because when you print it you get the reverse of whatever you etched.

Our theme was time-travel. Brainstorming, I thought about Calvin and Hobbes' cardboard box, Doc Brown and Marty McFly, wormholes, clocks, etc. I really wanted to draw Calvin and Hobbes because they are not only hilarious, but you can play off the concept of time travel with them even more than the literal interpretation of their time machine adventures of the cardboard variety.

Calvin and Hobbes can represent child hood. Imagination. Time goes by slowly when you are a little kid. I remember that summers used to last forever, and now they just zoom right passed me at light speed. The more I thought about Calvin and Hobbes, the more I wanted to do it. But then when I put pencil to paper for preliminary sketching purposes, nothing flowed right.

So I went back to the drawing board. (Heh.)

I revisited my initial ideas, Doc Brown would be too difficult to etch his face, the same with Mr. McFly. And I'm just not all that interested in trying to draw a wormhole, truth be told. I still really liked that idea of childhood and going back to being little. There's something so timeless about the imaginations of little kids, something that transcends the ages. All little kids play pretend.

And you know when you're a little kid and lots of things are funny? I thought about jokes. This one joke, that is just too cheesy for me to love in a way that it should be loved goes like this:

Why did the boy throw the clock out the window?

Because he wanted to see time fly.

Oooooh boy. I'll give you a second to recover from the lameness of that last punch line. Well, actually just the whole joke. Ooh man.

Anyway, I thought about that literally. It's time "flying." Well, I pictured an alarm clock in an airplane. Flying, airplanes, yeah I'm really creative, I know. But then I thought instead of fly, to go back to the idea of traveling and wouldn't it be just so cool if the numbers were actually traveling off the clock?

I included the Polaroid picture, doily cloth, and broken beaded necklace to represent objects of "timelessness" and I crafted the clocks to appear somewhat as pocket watches. I just kind of went for a vintage feel since time has traveled so far from that era.

This print is just an artist's proof and I'll print my edition on Thursday on Stonehenge paper instead of sketchbook paper. And then I'll move on to a copper plate instead of a plexiglass one.