Officially this is the third of my screen printing projects, but in many ways it was actually the final project. For one, it was worth twice the points of the real final project (Koi Moon) and I spent far, far more time on this one.

I won't go into full details, but suffice to say it took about two weeks, spending every day printing to get this thing done, and then the colored sign stencils ended up being WAY off, and I had to fix all of them manually. Argh.

Anyway, for this project we had to pick one of three movie titles and base our image off of that, I chose "Lost In Translation," even though it was a terrible movie, because it gave me an excuse to do things with Japanese.

I usually try to avoid symbolism in my work, but this ended up being a little bit of a personal piece for me. I'm going to be going back to Japan for a semester next April, and while I'm terribly excited to go back, I'm a bit nervous as well. Even though I've studied the language for five years now, there's still a lot I don't know, and it can be a bit overwhelming sometimes. So this is me, going forth into Japan. It promises to be a very interesting experience, likely completely different from the one I had before. I think I'm ready, but who knows?

Technical difficulties aside, I'm extremely happy with this piece. It's easily the best screen print I've done this semester, and more importantly, it's a lot closer to my preferred style, with the big bold lines and high contrast and the delicious, delicious neon colors.

Art (c) Beth Zyglowicz 2007.