High Desert Steam's Annual Steampunk Exposition

Yesterday was our local Steampunk group's annual exposition. High Desert Steam, has an active group with many events throughout the year. Many of the Sacramento Steamer's were visiting or vending too.
Our family dressed up and joined in the festivities, snatching up bargains and the youngest won a raffle prize. Lots of fun for the whole family.

Our family were dressed as airship pirates, this is me with my youngest daughter Olivia.

This art car, called the Nautilus after the Jules Verne fictional submarine, was at Burning Man last year and in our Sparks Steampunk Christmas Parade. High Desert Steam won first place!

Inside the Nautilus

Mary Crawley, did a "riveting" undress, which I could not possibly photograph.

Here are some of the other local Steampunks, including Willie Puchard, who is a major force in High Desert Steam's event organization. Below are numerous attendees.

Monique below, is wearing an outfit from her local store "The Melting Pot"

The Exposition included a novel fashion show along a Victorian railroad station, complete with train.

We walked the catwalk at a leisurely stroll, while our kids, plus Dante (a local martial arts star) did a demonstration of the mixed martial arts form known as Bartitsu. This martial arts became famous by mention in both the original books and movies of Sherlock Holmes.

The kids were quite magnificent!

Below are Captain Wormwood (my husband), myself and Nila Northsun, all wearing our favorite hats custom created by Killbuck of Kostoom Arts.

Photos by Joaquin Rafael Roces, Tammy Islander and Doctor Morbius. I would love the names of the other participants in the photos, so please comment if you have info, Thanks.

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Encaustic Monoprint Technique

Today I visited a printmaking friend's studio. Amy is experimenting with encaustic monoprints. I have never heard of this before so I was excited to have a demo. Here is the basic process: 1. Heat up the homemade heat box. 2. Rub the beeswax pigment sticks on the metal surface of the heat plate to melt them. Create a design on the plate with one or more colors. Step 3. Lay a piece of rice or rag paper face down on the painted design and cover with newsprint. Burnish. Step 4. Carefully pull the paper away from the heat plate. Steps 5-6. Clean the heat plate with paper towels. Add more color to the heat plate and repeat the process to add patterns or more color to the print. The smell of the wax is yummy and the pigments are really thick and rich to work with. I had a little play to get a feel for what the print is like (image below). Now I want to build a heat box and play!!

Peacock Paintings/prints

I'm working on the peacock paintings at the moment and some relief prints. I am slowly filling in the shapes and colors of the paintings, starting from the top and working down with each color. I'm grouping them with my 8 color reduction cut relief print. Also a feather linocut and painting, both in their early stages. The linocuts below are variation experiments based on the imagery above. It still feels like I am a long way to completion, but hopefully they will pull together fast at the detail stage.

DeMeng Workshop

We made crazy vehicles in Michael DeMeng's workshop. Here are a selection of some of the works in progress: Here we had a critique with Michael discussing everyone's progress. I loved this steampunked up critter! This is the cool studio by the harbor that we worked in for four days, pretty cool view! Later in the day we had a project with Tracy and Teesha Moore with a bunch of artists from different workshops.

Cricketts Inky Art Blot

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