CeLOUbrate Print

Saturday was Thunder Over Louisville but we decided to skip the crowds and head to Portland. The Louisville neighborhood known as Portland that is. The Portland Museum was putting on CeLOUbrate Print and the main attraction was making prints with a steamroller.

In the run up to the shindig they'd been doing events where you could carve a piece of wood and bring it to the museum and they'd run over it with a steamroller to make a print.

Was fixin' to go and make one myself but never quite managed to find the time. Damn pesky time, always playing hide and seek. Had to content myself with just observing and maybe snapping a photo or two.

Some of the prints people were making were incredible. If you look close, that's the Louisville skyline with presumably the recent eclipse above.

Where's a drunk college student when you need someone to steal you a steamroller? Really want to do this now, you don't need to liberate a steamroller to do it but it might help.

Someone had conveniently set up this shot for my photographic pleasure. There was quite a line of people waiting to have their print made but the creator of this one was nowhere to be found.

It was a nice day not to be surrounded by several hundred thousand partying neighbors. Just a band playing on the back porch, a steamroller and some local printmakers and their booths.

Making paper here.

Most of the folks running the booths were University of Louisville students, with a University of Kentucky professor thrown in to balance things out.

Think this is some sort of marbling shenanigans. Have come across videos of it while perusing the infinite scroll but never seen it done in person.

You add something I don't recall to the water to make the paint (ink?) float, then drip your colors in there, then run thingamajiggers that look like combs back and forth to create patterns.

After that you just lay whatever you're printing on on top and then lift it back up and let it dry.

Portland was just outside the airshow box but you could sure as hell hear it.

At one point we had a flight of what I believe were F-16s fly over at low level. Knew I had next to no chance of getting the jets in focus but still had to snap a shot. Ended up liking the result more than I'd expected.

You could even get your arm marbled. Medusa was nowhere to be found but they had made a crochet frog that you could dissect. Or at least unzip to find an embroidered skeleton and felted organs you could remove. Got distracted playing with it and forgot to take photos though.

Whether flesh or fiberglass, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

The Portland Museum is a neighborhood history and art museum, so we had to check it out before we left. Didn't take many photos but did find Mrs. Doubtfire playing John James Audubon. Seemed to think it was all for the birds. There were a few of those, along with some of Audubon's paintings.

Alright, time to do what the owl said and scram.