OUAC Print #1: Guam's Lost Endemics
Did you know that Once Upon a Checklist is a podcast, and a print series?
Along with each episode I’m going to be making a unique piece of artwork that will sit alongside the stories that I discovered while exploring each month’s checklist.
I decided when I started OUAC that I’d give myself two challenges for the prints:
Each one would involve some kind of hand-drawn element. I’ve been drawing birds on and off for a few years now and I wanted a chance to build this skill a little bit.
I’d experiment with different printing processes, and these processes would be integral to how each artwork functions as a tangible object. Put a different way, the medium of the print would inform how it works as a visualization.
The first print in the series, Guam’s Lost Endemics, is a risograph print. Risographs machines are kind of half photocopier and half mimeograph. ‘Riso’ prints have a really gorgeous grain, and because colours are printed separately really nice effects can be achieved using transparencies and gradients. It’s hard to capture the colours in Guam’s Lost Endemics properly - it’s flourescent orange and blue and green… it pops.
The print folds, a choice that was meant to evoke the kind of maps or pamphlets a birder might have carried with them back in 1978.
The back of the print features a Brown Tree Snake that I generated with a little program I wrote so that the curve of the snake matches the population levels of snakes on Guam over the course of time. It’s printed in metallic gold.
The real trick of the print is that when it is held up to light, the snake is visible through the front of the print and the population curves of the Brown Tree Snake and the Ko’Ko’ can be compared.
Prints for each episode are in limited editions of 50, signed and numbered. You can buy individual prints in the OUAC store. Prices will vary a little bit depending on how each one ends up getting made; this one is $40.
Here’s a better deal though: if you subscribe as a Checklist Aficionado you’ll be guaranteed to get one of every print that I make. The first twenty people that subscribe will get all ten of the prints for $250; after that the price will go up to $300 (shipping outside of the U.S. will be a little extra).
You’ll get ten really unique pieces of art and you’ll be supporting this strange little project of mine. I hope you’ll consider it.
-Jer
ps. In case you missed it last week the first episode of Once Upon a Checklist is available now. You can listen to it on the Substack page, or find it on pretty much any podcast app including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts and Overcast.
