Artist Statement - Final Print

My element is Neon. The atomic number of this is 10. Neon was first discovered through the study of liquefied air. The name comes from the word “neos” which means new in Greek. The main use of Neon is advertisements and lights. I got the idea for the imagery I chose is because Nyan the Cat is also called the Neon Cat. Since neon was in this cat’s name and it’s the name of my element, I decided to make this my image so people could infer what my element is. To start off this print, I had to sketch down three ideas. After that, I then decided to go with the Nyan the Neon Cat idea. Then I sketched my print reversed on a 4x6 trace paper. Next, I carved the reversed image on a styrofoam tray in order for it to be ready to be printed. Then I coated the tray with ink and the parts of the tray that were carved did not take in that much ink. I placed a paper on top of the inked tray and applied pressure everywhere in order to get the print on the paper. I did the inking process a couple of times and all of the prints came out the original way I drew the image. What I would do differently is how much red ink I put on my paper and also make the carves on the tray deeper to get a better image. My favorite part of this project was inking the print and printing it onto the paper. I liked rolling the ink onto my tray because it just felt to smooth, and I also liked when I printed the images on the paper because they came out looking good in my opinion.