Series Prints

Around the middle of 2002 I received an email with an attached .vfl file of experimental code to test with Houdini 6.0. It was a shader called "Radiant", crafted to render radiosity/global illumination-like images.

It's probably safe to reveal now that "Radiant" was written by my friend Mark Elendt of Side Effects Software. With Mark's permission, I uploaded the code to Odforce in October of 2002, crediting it to "Anonymous".

I was excited by the look I could get with that shader, especially when compared to ray-traced renderings that were standard at the time. Over the next year I spent most of my spare time creating dozens of images using "Radiant".

It wasn't all "joy", however. The experimental code left random black pixels throughout each image, which required hours of painstaking manual repairs using a paint program... until my eyeballs burned. (In retrospect, I should have written some code to go through each image and fix those black pixels automatically.)

By early 2004 I was using Houdini 7.0, which included production-quality ambient occlusion rendering, (no more burning eyeballs), and continued working on this series of images until January of 2005.

I always wanted the final output of these images to be large-format prints on fine-art paper, rather than just digital displays or photographic prints.

I also wanted to capture the feel of the stone-lithography prints I used to make at art-school (NSCAD) in 1979 & 1980. To this end, I purposely left in, or even added, some "grain" to the images, in an effort to replicate the texture from stone-litho tablets.

My first test of large format printing was in July of 2004 with a respected commercial printing facility in NYC. The tests went poorly and, after several weeks and hundreds of dollars in expenses, I abandoned the commercial printing route.

Later that year, by some great fortune, my designer/photographer friend, Kathy Landman, purchased an "Epson Pro 4000" large format printer and needed a place to install it.

I had extra space at my animation studio located on 22nd Street near Fifth Avenue, and was more than happy to let her install it there.

The printer used Ultrachrome archival inks and could handle large sheets or rolls of thick, fine-art paper. After some trial-and-error I was finally able to output the high quality prints I would be happy with.

Still under the influence of Robert Rogers, my lithography instructor at NSCAD, (and Printer Fellow at Tamarind Lithography Workshop), I was determined to output limited editions (10 each) of some selected images.

However, before leaving NYC (and the glorious Epson Pro 4000) in mid 2005, I was only able to finish printing the "artist's proofs", a few complete editions, and several partial editions.

Links to all the "Series" images created between mid-2002 and January 2005

Links to an obsessive amount of print details.

Below are links to some additional information.