Ortiz spent hours and hours with an oil pencil, a technique he found to be similar to the fine lines he uses in painting his ceramics. Working late into the night to produce the carefully hatched images. In the proofing, he added the red triangle and circle which was placed both in front of and behind the figures to produce a three-dimensional object.

Translator has three eyes, one looking to the future, one on the present, and one to the past. As the Commander of the Spirit World Army, he moves others through time and space, bringing together the ancestors of the past with the warriors of the future. For the Translator, Ortiz used a liquid form of lithographic ink to reproduce a watercolor.

Throughout his career, Ortiz has experimented and expanded his practice to include new techniques and media, learning new ways to fire, new glazing, new shapes, and challenging himself to build larger figures. He is also constantly exploring different media, including costume design, jewelry, photography, video, and, most recently lithography, with his first attempt at Tamarind. For the artist, “Working with different mediums provides a gratifying diversion while I work on various projects. I am never bored. I can pencil, paint, or digital sketch ideas for any ceramic idea, or a fashion or costume garment. Or, I can build an idea or character in clay, then reverse this process and recreate costuming and garment print designs that will appear on the fabric. Utilizing various mediums is essential for my work and creative process.”

During the week at Tamarind, he worked with the Institute’s master printer Valpuri Remling and her apprentices who assisted him through the process. The collaborative process is familiar to the artist as he often works with others to complete his projects, including ceramic artists, weapon experts, and videographers. Ortiz found some aspects of the process challenging and the team helped guide him through the process, and he views these prints as “an inevitable and natural expansion of my creations.” Though this was Ortiz’s first works in the medium, his prints employ many different qualities in the production of lithographs demonstrate the flexibility of the medium, which can reproduce and combine the qualities of a drawing, a painting, an etching, or a photograph, as well as adding new features of its own.