Pistoles Press

Fatter Fatness!

2011-02-25T09:59:00.000-08:00

   It has been a little while since I've posted! I love blogging and documentation but sometimes it does get in the way of making work. I have a show in April so I made the decision to skip a lot of blogging and get to the making part! Still had my camera handy but only picked it up when I felt things were well underway and my progress is going good.
   The latest work I have completed is dedicated to my wonderful muse, Fatter Fat Toad! You can read more about her here on my other blog:

Fatter Fat Toad in the Journey to Middle Earth

   The Chinese consider toads to be very auspicious and I really enjoyed Fatter Fat's company whether or not she brought me money. She brought me plenty of joy! I always wanted to carve a block to remember her by. It's been a year or so since I've seen her. I started with pictures I took of her in her favorite place next to porch steps. I picked out one of my favorites that I took of her and posted on my blogspot about her. She didn't like the camera and would puff herself up when I took photos so that she looked like a giant disk of warty clay! I liked the one of her head slightly turned to face the camera as she lay puffed up with her legs tucked under her. It showed off her warts and stripes. After she endured my irritating camera I would reward her with worms from my worm composter. This was maybe the secret to why she stayed around so much.

I sketched from this and several others. (The smaller sketches are from other smaller toads that have visited the house.) After roughing in her dimensions and markings, I transferred the sketch to a piece of battleship gray linoleum and went about carving. For some reason, it was hard to initially carve this work. I don't know if it was because I was worried that I'd somehow screw up or that this was the first time in a long time that I had carved battleship gray linoleum. Usually, I work with the golden hued (softer) stuff. I knew I'd like the gray material because it would hold more detail but somehow it was hard to just get started. I noticed myself avoiding her face so I decided to approach the carving through the markings in her flank. In hind sight, I think I was afraid of making an error in carving her face.

As I progressed I did something I never do when carving linoleum but may start doing. I took a black magic marker and colored over the remaining surface to get a good visual on what was going to print. I've never needed to do that before but for some reason this time around it was a good aid to help me balance tones throughout the rest of the piece.

As I began closing in on her head it was becoming less of a hassle to begin working on her face because now I had a "guide map" of sorts to work with. I could match the texture and colors in her face to the textures and colors in her body without second guessing because I could already see how they will look.

Once the carving was finished, I mounted it on a piece of plywood with carpet tape to make it type high on my vandercook printing press. The printing was a real treat and Fatter Fat must have been a real good omen because I suffered no set backs or issues during printing. I printed her up in an oil based ink made by Graphic Chemical called Antiquarian Black. It is supposed to hearken back to the early period when books were printed and it does have a warm rich tone that is very comfortable with my soft fibrous paper. I chose to photograph the final print rather than scan it so that the morning light would bounce off the edges of he impression and you can see how it is slightly debossed into the paper. Now all I have to do is sign and edition!

Dragonflies and Damselflies

2011-01-08T10:31:00.000-08:00

The holidays have passed and with them the memories of all we shared this season: kinship, gifts, flu viruses. . . 'Tis the season!
In celebration of ushering in the new this year, I'm starting my first post with some photos documenting a new painting I'm working on. I always enjoyed the works of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement artisans as well as works from the Art Deco period. Illustrations in books that looked like woodblock prints always thrilled me. Don't get me started on how much I loved Aubrey Beardsley. Later on down the road of life I'm finding out my fascination stems from the inspiration these artisans took in soaking up and processing their natural surroundings and then imbuing their everyday life and the objects that surrounded them with the spirit of that natural world. How wonderful, I began to think, it would be to practice the same habit with plants, animals, and landscape features of my OWN surroundings. This new body of work will my made with that concept in mind. This first endeavor has been REALLY educational.

I went boating down the Rivanna River a few times this summer with my friends. On one occasion I borrowed a sit on top kayak and I remember a very distinct experience. The sit on top version was effortless and allowed me to drift down the river with relative ease. I could take in my surroundings and even sketch if I wished. I was amused at the insects that surrounded the wake of the boat and at times I was so still that multiple dragonflies would light on my skin and ride with me while water striders would skim my wake as we drifted down river. (I will be investing in a sit on top in the near future!)
I began the painting featured above in inspiration of that moment in time. There are a few varieties of dragonfly that stuck out in my mind but I did not know their names and I had not brought a camera with me (or a sketch book!) to document. I set about internet surfing and learned a few things. Two of the three varieties that stuck in my mind were not dragonflies but damselflies. I remember Ebony Jewel Wing Damselflies and Bluets from the creek in my back yard. I also remember large true dragonflies by the name of Common White Tail Dragonflies. I sprinkled these over a peppering of Water Striders with a background of an aquatic weed called Water Star Grass. This was the river weed that I fell so much in love with as it reminded me of a woman's hair softly listing back and forth in the currents.

I started drawing the damselflies and rendered first the Bluets. Their wings were paddle shaped and are pretty crystal clear except for one cell dyed black. It was very mesmerizing to mimic the pattern that the veins in their wings take it was almost like drawing cascading lightening.

Next came the Ebony Jewel Wing Damselflies. When painted, these insects wings will be entirely black but I want to use varying shades of black and charcoal to let the vein pattern show through. Their wings are shaped more like rudders and are more robust than the Bluets.

And lastly, All hail the power of the Common White Tail Dragonfly for he hath brought down the artist with a mighty blow! When I first rendered this insect I thought, This should be the quickest one to draw because a good portion of each wing is dedicated to an opaque black pigment. This lasted until I began to render the wings in the stained glass tile pattern that is evident in their biology. Teeny tiny little cells lined up patiently next to each other in beautifully, minute, intricate detail. I had to break out the swing arm magnifying glass because my eyes were becoming so tired.

Mostly because I could only dedicate 1 to 2 hours of my day to this piece before I had to get ready for work, working on this solitary dragonfly has taken about a week.

But today is Saturday and I finally finish this single dragonfly. Perhaps Sunday will bring at least half of the last dragonfly. I hope to dedicate at least part of the day to sharpening my block carving knives as I still have a crayfish in need of a new life as a key block!

Lana won't be at the Market this Saturday!

2010-12-16T08:54:00.000-08:00

Sadness! Lana is not going to be at the Charlottesville Holiday Market this Saturday the 18th! I've finally managed to pick up some of the crud that everyone's been infected with. Bleh. I guess it was bound to happen at some point or another. I'm sad that I will miss out on the hand made birdhouses, yarn, mittens, scarves, wreaths, brooms, pottery, candy, sausages, and empanadas! You guys can go and get in on the last of all these locally made goodies, though!

More fun prints and handmade stamp goodness this Saturday!

2010-12-10T10:12:00.000-08:00

Yep, we're going to get out in it again this Saturday at the Charlottesville Holiday Market! There is the addition of my friend Jenny Swab who crafts these wonderful stuffed animals out of socks, gloves, and old sweaters. I'm particularly fond of her Glove Octopus stuffed animals! I will still be featuring my hand carved Cork Stamps and prints of my Farm People along with Holiday Cards and some other prints that I do. There will lots of other wonderful goodies about so come on down and don't miss out!

Exchange #47 Spoiler Alert!

2010-12-05T20:07:00.000-08:00

I'm killing two birds with this stone. I have a river themed show in April and also this exchange due so I thought I would combine the two. In my river themed show, I want to attempt to glorify our local Chesapeake Watershed/Appalachian flora and fauna to the extent that the Arts and Crafts printers glorified European and Medieval themes. I knew I wanted to do a print of a crayfish but wasn't exactly sure of how it would translate. This end sketch isn't exactly the vision I initially had but I can always sketch more. For now, I think this is lovely little arrangement. When I first began sketching I rendered numerous crayfish atop rocks in a creek with their claws raised in the air. I sat back and the image seemed idiotic to me. Having played in creeks I knew they usually hid under rocks and were loners. This final arrangement seems to do more justice to the truth than anything else. I wouldn't mind a quiet sunny afternoon under a stone with the water softly rushing by as I flicked my antennae back and forth. I intend to have a broken border to add some interest and am hoping to include some bokashi and maybe other surimono techniques. We'll see. For now this is a good start.

2010 Charlottesville Holiday Market

2010-11-23T08:15:00.000-08:00

So, the Charlottesville Holiday Market will begin this Saturday! I will be there on the dates and times listed in space #52. I'm excited to see how it turns out as it is now in the Farmer's Market Space instead of down in front of the Amphitheater. There is room for upwards of 100 crafts persons so I'm sure there is going to be a good selection of things. There is also an arts and crafts show going on in the Ice Park Space so this Saturday is turning out to be a real Downtown Arts Show!

Irons in the Fire

2010-11-13T18:46:00.000-08:00

The Raucous Auction at the VABC sure lights a fire in one's soul to get printing again! Everyone's enthusiasm and awe at the different works up for auction is infectious so I pretty much stayed at my drafting table today. For weeks (and maybe months) I've been only furtively creating things. It was mostly journaling and note writing. That's a good practice but if you did that nonstop you'll never make anything. So, today I took up the torch and set out on a journey to build the foundations of three projects that take priority on my list of "to-do".
Above is the mock up for the newest (and first that I am participating in) VABC group project. The project is called "Indulgences" and the finished product will be a receipt book full of tickets for different indulgences. I previewed the design that will be printed on the back of each ticket. Frank Riccio has designed for us an intricately beautiful image and it rocks the house! Garrett Queen has worked up the design format that we will be working in and did a perforation along one side on the sample and I'm really excited! It looks like a legitimate contract! The preview image was a 20% off coupon for purgatory. I've got something a bit more cynical in mind for mine. As you can read, it's a ticket to "The Big Sleep" which is a universal product of "The Big Industries", headed up by the Devil. I chose the receipt side to represent the terms of contract. This is just a mock up within the perimeters of the page. I typed everything out in photoshop and then printed it out to arrange on the real thing. There will be a little bit of wiggle room designed in but I wanted to get a general feel of how the sorts will fit when ready for print. I've decided I will design and hand carve the title at the top and the titles of each of the "Big Industries" with an image integrated in each title to represent the company. I'm going to print it in the sootiest black I can find. I already have bone black and antiquarian black from Graphic Chemical. Those are two good contenders I think. The imagery will be gritty and graphic and the "Big Company" titles will be the only parts of the ticket to have any color. I can't wait!!

The next project I worked on was my concept for a business card. Up until now, I've been designing images online and ordering cards from Overnightprints.com. They did my post cards for the show in July and I was none too happy. Admittedly, I should've ordered them earlier so that if there was an issue I could've had them redone but it was too little too late. I can understand bad design but the registration in the colors was off so it was jarring to look at and it really irritated me.
I've stayed away from printing my own business cards for two reasons. The first reason is business cards are small and tedious so printing each one is a pain in the ass. The answer to that is to set enough type to print a whole page and then cut them down to size afterwards but it is just as tedious to justify and measure the type for a whole page as it is to print little cards one at a time. Reason number two lies in the print itself. I kind of have a hang up on printing cards because the line gets blurred between "craft" and "fine art". The process is the same but the philosophy is different. One wouldn't think twice about tossing out a card but there is no way you would part with a "fine art print". So, I sat down and had a long and hard grapple over what to do. In the end I decided that if I love printmaking and am going to continue doing it, a card representing what I do would be the best way to go about advertising myself. I set about designing a template for a woodblock that is partitioned into "card sized" images. I'll carve these out and run them off in different colors. When I hand out these cards I will now be giving away tiny prints that people will hopefully enjoy. I'm hoping it will make a better impression and maybe people will want to follow what I'm doing. We'll see. Sorry, the image is a tad crappy. The follow up scans should be better.

Lastly, I finally started work on Baren Forum's Exchange #47. This is an open exchange of prints with Baren Forum members. The particular one I joined is relegated to the Moku Hanga technique and has a format of roughly 13"x 6". I have a show coming up in April on river themes so I chose the Chowanoke Crayfish as subject material. At first I designed it as a vertical orientation with a creek flowing down over various stones and about 6 crayfish perched atop with their claws lifted in the air as if dancing in the wind. I sat back and looked at it and it appeared severely Disney-ish to me. I totally erased every scrap of the image and went to a horizontal orientation. I know first hand that crayfish live under rocks and you have to carefully overturn them in a stream bed to find the little guys. I drew some stones and one with a lip that overhung. A single crayfish fit nicely under there. Wabi-sabi. The stone orientation and single crayfish feels more real to me. For the carving and printing I will take liberty with the water. I've really been into researching the Arts and Crafts movement lately and I'd like the give the water a glittering Gustave Klimt feel. We'll see what happens soon! Again, crappy photo. Pencil sketches never really translate well.

Raucous Auction Tomorrow!

2010-11-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow afternoon is the Virginia Artist Book Center's annual fundraiser "Raucous Auction"! Check out the official link:
Virginia Artist Book Center
It's a good opportunity to celebrate our new space and settle in as we shake the dust off our shoulders. From 5:30-8:00pm a good time will be had by all and we'll try to raise some funds to keep our our type clean and presses moving! The above poster was printed on the VABC Vandercook with wood and lead type that is part of the collection. Ain't printmaking grand?

Here's a shot of the moving guys getting the VABC's C&P Job Press into the new space. At first I thought it was my press because I saw the characteristic inking disk at the top. (It looks like a big silver dinner plate.) But then I saw the network of metal feet at the bottom and realized it was my press' big brother instead. These things weigh a lot and are really hard to maneuver. Shake it don't break it boys. . .

And here's little ol' me at the Crozet Meadows "Fall Display of the Arts" last Saturday. I met a lot of really nice people and it really was a beautiful day for it. Charlie Tucei took this picture and headed up a lot of the effort behind the showing. He's got a great portfolio of photos and had a display of his photography. I really like the colors in my display. Maybe the pink flowers on my flour sack table clothes were a bit much but I'm a sucker for that type of stuff.

Crozet Meadows Fall Display of the Arts

2010-11-02T10:18:00.000-07:00

I will be setting up a table with wonderful goodies for all to see and buy as treasures for holiday gifts or as treasures for yourself! Prices range from $5.00 to $75.00. I will also be bringing some of the blocks with me so that people can see some of the process of my craft. Come and experience the dying art of letterpress and woodblock printing!

Bulls, Billy Goats, and Cork Stamps!

2010-10-21T08:55:00.000-07:00

No, Pistoles Press has not died yet! I know it's been since March but I'm still in the game!

There has much that has transpired since my last post. I did finish printing my trilobites and squid prints and had a wonderful solo show at the McGuffey Art Center in Downtown Charlottesville, VA during July and August. I DID commit the cardinal sin of NOT posting about this here. Oops. There are reasons for this though. I do enjoy posting about the work I do but I found myself posting and documenting more than getting the art done. I was really feeling overwhelmed and burnt out towards the deadline for my show. Any artist will tell you putting together a solo show has the potential to leave one frizzled around the edges. But it was a great experience and I stood back for a little while and took a break.
In the meantime, VABC has moved it's location from the Ix Building on Elliot Ave. to underneath the Art Box in the Ivy Shopping Center. It's a move for the better but a smaller space and quite the crunch. I'll have to grab some photos to post!
As you can see above I have added two more gents to the collection of Farm People. The Bull is a suave character in his jet black suit and slick spats. The Billy goat is a dapper trickster in his seersucker suit and straw hat. I love his floppy ears! I've sketched out plans for the Nanny Goat but have yet to draw the cow. I can't decide between a "milk cow" concept or a "brown cow" concept. It's a bit hard to get around the "brown cow" concept when printed in black but I feel confident that people can recognize Jersey features from Holstein....maybe. On the other hand, I don't feel the need to render huge udders popping out from beneath a skirt hem! We'll just have to see how everything develops.

In other ventures, I've applied to do the Charlottesville Holiday Market this year. I've done the Farmer's Market a summer ago with good results. The experience was a fun one and the feeling from the place was really invigorating! I was hoping to peddle some cork stamps more so than the last time. In fact, most of my focus will be on them because they were way more popular than the prints. I did have some problems though. The first issue was that though the packaging was of my own design and was fun, it was tiring to create. I had measured and hand cut a template for a box and hand stamped my logo on it. Next you have to glue at least one side together and then later I found that you have to tape the bottom flap closed so it won't pop out and dump the stamp. To keep the stamp from rattling around in the box I wrapped it in tissue paper. All this creation and assemblage got old after about the 20th stamp. On top of that, after everything was finished and in a pretty display, people still wanted to take the stamp out and unwrap it before they decided they wanted to purchase it. I can understand that but it wore on the boxes if they didn't purchase. Lastly, after a single day of display out in the pretty spring sun, when I got home I realized that all of the stamps that didn't sell were severely faded. I didn't realize how fleeting stamp ink was in the sun! Some of the boxes I had to do over and that was really defeating.

So, time for a change. I needed a concept that looked nice and wasn't overly labor intensive. I also wanted something sustainable and a display that people could actually see what they were purchasing. I had a copious amount of cream card stock that I had purchased for bookmaking. I also had a set of Tuscan Ombree type from Hill&Dale Foundry that I will cherish forever. (They are an AMAZING foundry!) I also have a canister of red rubber based ink that will last me until Jesus comes home. (I hope he'll want some letterpress invitations to his tribulation soiree!) Lastly, I have some cool cotton sage colored twine that I've been keeping around forever. Put these all together and you have my new concept to try for displaying my cork stamps. The rubber based ink won't fade out in the sun. The paper and twine will decompose and can be recycled. The stamp is visible almost in the round and there is a sample of its image on the bottom. I'm hoping the design will work out as I rather like it and they are so much quicker than the old package. The only problem I foresee is the sample image which is still in stamp ink. If they don't sell, the sun will fade them over time. I'm willing to risk this though. I usually do letterpress runs of no less than 100 and if I have to replace them I've already printed 200. Wish me luck!

Things you neeb to know about printmaking

2010-03-03T21:58:00.000-08:00

Here is an excellent example of a "type demon". I had to laugh out loud when I pulled this first proof. Just a simple matter of slipping that letter out to replace it with the right one but I'm always deathly afraid that I'll get tired and not catch stupid mistakes until I'm on the last print. Thankfully I had two other people in the studio working around me so I bugged them to proof read and suffer through my poetry enough to say there were no more spelling errors.

Catherine Moore was working on a really neat project that is somewhat similar to mine in playing with how type is arranged to create mood and flow. I was really fascinated by here set up and it was neat to see that and hear her and Garrett Queen talking about soundscapes. People really do take sound for advantage and everything from pattering rain to the slow rumble of a train down the tracks has its place.

Above is a picture of her arrangement of wood type on the VABC Vandercook.

Meanwhile, I was neebing all the help I could get. I love my set of Fransiscan Type but I have since learned the valuable lesson that 16pt. font was not common at all. I thought I could borrow some spacing material for this project from the VABC but they never owned a set of 16pt. font so had no reason to ever acquire 16pt. spacing material. Thankfully, Dave Churchman of Sterling Type Foundry was there to save the day and was able to get me some. It wasn't much but my job has been small so far. I still need to find a good way of storing spacing material besides those plastic hardware bins. I HATE those things. In the mean time, my Lichee Black Tea tin now devoid of yummy beverage product will serve nicely as a repurposed spacing material storage unit.

Finished Squids

2010-02-22T06:55:00.000-08:00

Scanners never seem to do some images any justice and of course this scan doesn't really portray the soft blue glow of dots when viewed from some angles but I'm posting about the completion of my Bioluminescent Squid edition. I did the last run this past saturday and dusted the prints. The photo below better describes the effect of the interference powder.

Also finished and flourished with my asian chops are the Anti-Squids!

There was a flurry of activity at VABC this past saturday. There is a Vandercook press that is getting worked on and Garrett had all his tools out to do the job. It was neat to see the inside guts of the machine.

Josef was pulling some etchings off of a really neat material he found. There were no acid baths necessary. Everything was done in dry point and he did some really beautiful proofs of a gnarled and winding pine tree, a sitting bear, and this wonderful mushroom seen here.

Not pictured was Frank who was busily sketching at a nearby table. It's nice to work with peers on similar ventures. You can take breaks from printing to see what everyone else is up to!

Balizoma Prints

2010-02-14T18:54:00.001-08:00

This stony faced fellow is another in my trilobite series. His name is Balizoma and I printed him up this afternoon. I carved him one orientation on the block and then decided at the last minute to print him up another way. I hope it will create more interest in the final image when I add in the letterpress.
I got lazy saturday night and ended up paying for it today. I dampened the paper with my misting bottle instead of waiting for my dosa brush to soak. When I went to check the paper before printing it was dishearteningly warm. The was JUST enough water (we're probably talking microns here) to allow for a print run but I was still chasing the paper with misted newsprint and holding my breath when burnishing. Since I print on my desktop upstairs now, the upper part of the house is warm and dry in the winter and just breathing on the paper while printing (when it is this dry) can dry it out. They came out okay in the end but I learned my lesson and will be patient enough to use my dosa brush next time.

Parade of Ghosts

2010-02-13T13:33:00.000-08:00

This past friday saw the completion of the last reduction run for the bioluminescent squid. I did not have time to do the anti-squid but he will catch up soon enough. I would like to complete them in their entirety next weekend but I'm not sure they will be dry enough. The above picture is in VABC as I was pulling them off the Vandercook. I let them cure like that for about 8 hours and then came in to take them down to make room for another potential artist to hang. I was thinking about stringing a line of clothespins at home upstairs so that they can cure for a few days in the air. There are a total of 4 reduction layers of ink on there and it must be completely dry before I do the last pass of tintbase with luminescent powder or everything will turn iridescent. Pretty but not the desired effect.

Here is one of the squids hanging to dry. The registration holes are taped to the back with easy remove tape. To make it "easier" I carved the registration pins into the block and once they were finished and I was heavy into carving and printing the reduction work, maybe they did make registration less painful. But they were a pain in the butt to carve. I'll probably begin the Bioluminescent Octopus print and use the regular registration pin jig and with I had hand carved them instead. LOL!

Spots and Templates

2010-02-10T07:17:00.001-08:00

Snow in the wilderness is a beautiful thing. Snow in the wilderness with adult obligations such as a day job, lack of a wood stove, an untrustworthy heater/power source, and a looming deadline for show.....I'll have to think of an appropriate word for that...when I have time.
Complaints aside, spots are done! Here we have one spotted squid suit ready for the final run of the reduction process. After that comes the pretty tint base and interference powder dusting and then both the bioluminescent squid AND the anti-squid are done!! It will be nice to add two new editions of work to the completion list and feel a sense of victory. Finding perfect frames only enhances the experience!
In other pursuits, I'm cutting a special jig for the letterpress on my Harpetida print. The poem talks about our little specimen basking in the warm shallows on an afternoon four hundred and sixteen million years ago. I wanted to print up the text in waves that lap past its shell. I kind of wish there weren't seven waves to cut but I'll just hang out with my little jig saw and a hot cup of tea one afternoon and get it done like always. I just know it will print up great. I also found some stars to accent the type and it will be really beautiful to see it all done!

Closing in

2010-02-02T08:34:00.000-08:00

The skin patches on my squid continue to spread like an infection down the length of the color block. My poor little gouge is starting to tell me more and more that honing is not enough anymore. I keep telling it that if it holds out until the end of squid's little tentacles I will sit down with the water stones for a proper session of blade restoration. This carving is tedious but not as bad as the first block done with teeny tiny spots. The larger spots make for faster coverage. It's nice to sit back sometimes and survey the progress one has made with carving. Now to rest the eyeballs before trotting off to the day job...

Two Posts in One Day?!

2010-01-31T17:43:00.000-08:00

Just closing in on a personal goal. I wanted to complete the mantle of the squid in one day and I managed to do just that! It helps to have a driving force behind you when endeavoring on an arduous venture so I highly recommend Respighi's "Fountains of Rome" followed by sprinklings of Tom Waits. "Falling Down" and "Metropolitan Glide" should do the trick.
I had to get rid of all the eye parts and turn the skin into patches. The large pale orb definitely stares at you the whole time you are carving and I have a feeling it will continue to do so until I get to that part and it too will dissolve into a patterned patchwork. That will have to wait for another day.

Sparkling Squid!

2010-01-31T09:40:00.000-08:00

So, I've been on this kick of trying to finish or at least surge ahead on the numerous projects that lie ahead. The inundation of snow and rain here has more than inhibited my process of finishing but the one good thing about piling on the projects is that if you get flooded in and can't get to the studio to print, you can always do design work or carve on another project! Here is the "key" block for my reduction series of bioluminescent animals. I have finished the mist of photophors that will be draped over his body in a shimmer of interference blue powder. The eye and side fins on his head still have to be carved off as they were just left there for registration purposes. Yes, it is curious to have a key block for a reduction print but it is the layers of "color" beneath him that will act as the reduction.

Here is a shot of the first run of the reduction block on my Vandercook. I decided that not only a blue bioluminescent squid would look great but also an "anti-squid" series would be fun. I have some paper that is made with bits of bark and large fiber tossed in it. A luminescent squid printed up with layers of tint base extender with a hint of black and a dark silver dusting my look neat. Here is a shot of that paper over the first run of the reduction block. Those paper registration tabs were the HUGEST pain in the @ss to put on. I had to measure the exact middle of the paper and then the exact middle of the tabs and then line those up to tape down. Even then the registration wasn't spot on on some of them but the joy of the bark paper was I could see through it to register the bottom if it wasn't exact.

In past prints, one of the things I tried to eliminate was inconsistency but as I got exposed to more techniques in printmaking and more work from other artists I grew envious of certain textures and wanted to try some of these things myself. I really enjoy the fine texture of the wood that has been picked up in this oil based print. The ingres paper in the blue series works well with this as it gives the illusion of deep ocean with its dark waters containing much detritus and it helps the effect of translucency in the white squid.

Of course, using handmade paper with bits of bark and larger fiber tossed in is a total embrace of inconsistency and I actually sought out which position and side of the paper would capture the most texture when printing up the "anti-squid" series. I wanted the appearance of this animal floating around in an unknown ether that may or may not exist in a dimension between worlds. In quantum physics there is a theory that there are 13 "layers" that make up the physical world we know and they are referred to as "branes" (short for membrane) but I thought the title "brane squid" sounded stupid. "Anti-squid" gives more of a reference to the theories of dark energy and dark matter. Not in the "bad" or "evil" sense but more on the "opposites" sense. Go read some on CERN.....

Sadly, I forgot my camera at this point and have printed up two more layers on this work. The picture below relays the latest layer on the series. I love how the eye came out and the lack of fins on the body at this point really makes them pop out in the prints! I now have to dissolve this entire piece into a flurry of "skin patches" that will be slightly bigger than the sparkling photophors. After I print that up it will be time to set up for the key block and my dusting hood for the final magic! Can't wait!

Goal!

2010-01-04T08:35:00.000-08:00

Well, the goal was 5 editions but I'm calling 4 out of 5 not bad! You'll notice that the images are not all centered. My good friend and artist Amanda Johnson suggested that I not center all of them because it would add interest and movement and I think she's right. I especially like Ensifer at the bottom left hand corner because he looks like he's going to crawl right off the page. Well, the first hurtle of printing is over but up next comes the type setting. I have a set of Fransiscan type that I purchased from NA Graphics and I've been dying to use it but god knows where I packed it during the move and I'll be nuts trying to find it but at least I might get a few more boxes resolved, bleh. The VABC might have some tasty accents like stars and such to add to the mix so I'm really excited to finish these out.
Now, back to carving squid photophors....

The Cold Push

2010-01-03T21:21:00.001-08:00

After wading through a New Year's Day hangover, I set about my goal of beginning the final printing of my Trilobite Series for the show I have due in April. My goal was 5 editions for each trilobite I had the color block and key block finished for an edition of 30 prints each (so I would have to print 35 all together to account for mistakes). This was to be completed by the end of the weekend. I already had the paper cut and resting in my plastic humidor box. I had begun the printing back in October when I was intent on printing with my soil ink. That would have been such a great print. Alas, it was not in the stars and so rather than waste resources I dried out the remaining paper and set the project aside to deal with the hell of moving out of my studio. I still have the "ink" I processed from soil. Maybe one day I will print with it.

I got up this past Saturday and set up my printing station/drafting table. I have a canister of premade McClain's brand nori paste but when I reached for it I saw that it was getting on the low side. I decided that if I'm going to go with the Amazonite and Malachite pigments that I might as well roll out the process and cook up my own paste too. I had purchased a bag of rice starch that I keep in a cobalt blue apothecary jar and it that makes it feel like my little treasure. I'm still keeping an eye out for a suitable steamer trunk to keep all my preground pigments in so I can really pile on the atmosphere. I trotted down to the kitchen with my tattered copy of "Japanese Book Binding" by Kojiro Ikegami and my mysterious blue jar and my husband asked if I was cooking up potions today. I should have taken a picture of the nori steaming and bubbling away on my stove but the truth of the matter is I didn't want to photograph the spaghetti sauce stains that were splattered on the stove top as well!

Now, there have been several reasons that I have put off printing these little guys in the past. The number one reason was "What if the soil pigment didn't work?" and that reason has been scratched off because low and behold it didn't. The next was "I need to spend more time sketching and carving." True but time is a wasting and deadlines they are a coming. There was also "What if the paper doesn't work or the Malachite or Amazonite pigments don't work out? What if your registration is a nightmare?!?!" Well, the only way to know is to just get down to it.
I had forgotten that I had already printed up the color block for Norwoodia in Amazonite and those prints had been dried. Even though my kento should be on point I was nervous about rewetting prints that had been dry for a few months and expecting the key block to just line up like magic.....but you know what? It did. Yay! I took that as a good omen and so I began trucking along with my little print set up cranking out my army of 35 Norwoodia.

Here is Norwoodia peeking out from under his blanket of Kozo.

I was impressed at how deep and rich the Amazonite color was. It is a mineral native to Virginia and can be found in jewelry but Daniel Smith has taken to grinding it into pigment and I would have never thought that the color would be so vibrant. The light fastness is supposed to be superb and I'm glad because I'm always expecting colors like that to photo-degrade. Sadly, I don't think the pigment was from Virginia. I think it was from Russia but at least it is the same mineral.
Though the colors were as I expected them, I found them lack luster for some reason. In painting class, I remember being warned repeatedly that the colors change when they dry so that don't appear as vibrant in their dry phase as when with their wet phase. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I liked the prints more when they dried than when they were wet. The pigment took on a soft glow and lost the dull flatness it had when wet. I wonder if this is due to in part because they are mineral pigments. I'm more willing to bet that it is that special magic that Japanese Washi paper possesses. Colors just bounce and glow within it.
I was almost finished with the Norwoodia edition when it began to get cold in my little room. I thought this was due to handling all the wet paper and ink but upon inspecting the thermostat it was confirmed that our heat was on the fritz. Some people don't think 56 degrees is cold but I HATE being cold and consider the thermostat being on 72 a sacrifice for the sake of the planet. I'm getting a wood stove the first chance I get. Anyways, I felt like this would be another potential excuse. "Oops, the heat's not working pack it in and save it for another day that we can think of something else to procrastinate about." I had already wet all this paper and cooked up fresh nori. It was just time to make a kettle of hot tea and keep on truck'n.

Up next were the little tiny trilobites called Angnostoidea. These guys were somewhat of a pain because I was actually printing a grouping 6 trilobites and so had to watch the registration. Even though most of the time the Malachite (lighter shade) pigment printed up dark it was hard to see on the plate as it was very pale and I was worried that I didn't have enough pigment on. I'd add more and then worry if I was flooding the block.

At the end of the day, I had my two little armies of Agnostoidea and Norwoodia and I called it quits because my fingers were frozen. The next day I printed up one of my favorite trilobites Ensifer.

All of its wandering whipping appendages made me cringe with the registration ahead but all went well and I am happy with my small army of Ensifers.

I printed the color block for another of my trilobites but ran out of steam....and heat for the day. But tomorrow morning the trilobites and I will emerge well rested and ready for another day of printing!

Christmas Squid

2009-12-28T20:28:00.001-08:00

So, the burner has been turned back on a lot of things while the world turns upside down like a snow globe over the holidays. Projects, thoughts, and obligations swirl madly around and I just wait in the middle for everything to fall into place on the ground. It's a waste of energy to try and run after them after all. We did end up with a white christmas that I'm very thankful for but is very hazardous to drive in. You can check out photos at www.journeytomiddleearth.blogspot.com.
I had started this series of three prints to add to my Limulus and Trilobites print to flesh out a show I'm slated to have in April along with Anne Cheeks and Robin *. I'm hoping to print up some Trilobites the first weekend in January but in the mean time I'm entertaining myself with this new project. I'm still having a little burn out with the Trilobite and Limulus project as it just feels like it's dragging on now but some of that is due in part to the "start/stop" aspect of it. I (like many other artists) like to see a project through and don't like stopping for things like day jobs, eating, sleeping....LOL, but that's life. Another reason I'll address next.

Here is the block for the first of three oil based prints I'll call the Bioluminescent Series. Firefly Squids put on a quite a show in Japan and I've always wanted to try the concept out in printmaking. I sketched out squids for a few days and I couldn't get the tentacles quite like I wanted them. Finally, I closed them up in an encasement as a squid does when it moves and for some reason that seemed best to me. Curious, considering I love writhing swirling tentacles. At any rate, the concept is to print at least three under print patterns of the squid body frame in a transparent white and then print a transparent base pattern of stippling to represent the photophors present in marine animals bioluminescent flesh. I would then dust these with an interferance blue so the viewer would be treated to a "schiller-like" experience as the squid lights up depending upon where you stand. I hope it works because I want to try this on an Octopus and a Trilobite also.
I brought my block to VABC Block Night and shared good carving and comradery. I must have been tired because I found carving the stipple to be exceedingly annoying. My friend Josef Beery had a great idea! He recommended filing a small tube of brass (found in model making shops, clever!) to a sharpness similar to my japanese carving knives. That way I could take a hammer and tap the stipples into my design and take my tiny chisel and chip away what doesn't belong. This was a great tip!.....and I didn't take it. I'll tell you why.
Having the disease of perfectionism is tedious but can be rewarding, however, you can also miss out on some happy accidents. The trilobite prints were starting to bore me because there isn't too much room to stray from the original design. Drawing them freehand was rewarding because I got to design how they were positioned but I still have to stay within the bounds of what the specific species design allowed. There weren't many deviations during carving either. Part of the reason that I fell in love with oil based woodblock prints were the little tailings that the carver sometimes "forgot" to take out. Those little bits of material that printed up and gave away the trail of the knife added an exciting energy to prints that otherwise would've seemed mundane. I decided to forgo the tedium of grinding a "tube blade" and forge ahead with my regular niddling fashion. The block sat for a week or two and then after work (on Christmas Day) a familiar notion began to creep up my soul and I felt like carving. I sat down to work on my squid and the stippling just seemed to flow out and around my knife. Here is a close up:

Notice the tiny little "tailings" that I've left in between the marker dots that will act as contracted photophors. If I had quested for "perfection", I would've been relegated to that one perfect shape of stipple that I think would've detracted from the piece. Now, not only do I have tiny photophors but also regular photophors that are organically shaped.

Don't worry, Josef. I'll still try your handmade tool idea some day anyway! Or, I challenge some one else to beat me to it!

Epic Book of Draconic Struggle

2009-11-12T07:36:00.000-08:00

So, there has been an extended absence of my presence on this blog as many things have come to pass this past month. I can't say that I didn't see it coming. I just wanted to deny that I was going down that road. When you decide that you are going to "be" an artist you should be under no delusions that you're instantly going to be awash with funds (from the sale of your work) or be instantly lauded by the general population. Nothing could be further from the truth. Art history should tell anyone that artisans live dramatic and sometimes abusive lives and only recently have been recognized as individual crafts persons instead of workers within a guild. Then why do we do it? I guess I'm straying from the point. I have moved out of my McGuffey studio and on to the next phase of life as an artist that I like to call hibernation. I think my presses have gotten the best out of this deal! They are free to romp and play with the other equipment at the Virginia Artist Book Center just a few blocks up the street from McGuffey. My house got the worst of it though as the other supplies and equipment are crammed floor to ceiling in our little log cabin in the woods. It's an appropriate enough place for an artist/psycho isn't it?....a little log cabin in the woods? Anyways, I know when I'm beat and sometimes you just have to roll over and cut your losses. Art isn't easy. It can be, but it's not right now. I couldn't hold down a studio and make a living but when my eyes started acting up again it was time to just let go. I'm often reminded of the monkey and the calabash story. African hunters cut a hole in dried calabash and put fruit in it to lure monkeys. The monkey will stick his hand in but can't draw out both his hand and the fruit. Every time, the hunters are able to catch and kill the monkey because he won't let go. So, this monkey is letting the fruit go! I work at a hospital now in an ICU so I see every day how life could be worse. As I was wading through the clutter of my studio accouterments I found a bag containing the supplies I had made for my journal concept. I thought maybe I could have fun and make money by designing journals with fantasy images that were dusted in metallic pigments. I finished the above book and called it the "Epic Book of Draconic Struggle" for fun. Yes, the weather is always good on my planet. Two asian dragons swirl in combat around an orb that constantly blows their flaming skin with rays of radiation. It's sort of a fantastical way of viewing the sun. I envisioned it also as being an echo of Yin and Yang. At any rate, my leaving my studio is just another slip down the trough. I know my jump to another crest is just around the corner.

Two More Swimmers for the Pool

2009-09-16T09:17:00.000-07:00

Two more little trilobites have come to join the block printing party. I uploaded the sketch of Kolithapeltis early (http://pistolespress.blogspot.com/2009/02/camera-crippled.html) on when I was designing the block images. Its head still looks like an old electrolux vacuum cleaner but the shape of its body continued to stick in my mind as I readied to carve. Something was not quite right and I couldn't put my finger on it. As I waded around the internet for photos of this animal I began to see that my haste to render the animals end as a soft fin like structure (as in a fish) was contorting its back spines out of proportion. From what I can guess the paddle-like end of the creature was probably more like a finger nail or the shells of soft shell crabs; flexible and soft but still tough and able to retain a solid shape. I retooled the image to make the back paddle take on more of a disk shape and it complimented the habit of its back spines much better. With its sweeping head spines it looks ready to zoom around the shallows like a prehistoric catfish!

Hollardrops reminds me of a little tank as its plates and spines were more on the thick side and less refined. I wanted to emphasize its back shell with its scalloped protrusions but I'm not sure that this pose achieved that. I had fun rendering the bulbous folds of its face, though, and I doubt that it will turn out to be a bad print.
I am so addicted to the way a block looks when freshly carved with its bright orange lines. I almost hate to put ink on it but I know that the rewards afterwards will be many! I can't wait to see how they print up!

Proofing Indigenous Ink

2009-08-03T09:34:00.000-07:00

So, I worked with the ink I had made from the soil on our land for the first time today by proofing up the first five trilobites I had carved. My goal was to pull some proofs in the soil ink and be able to actually use those as well to make transfers for the color blocks. Well, it was a pleasant dream anyway.
It was a nice feeling anyways to begin printing with a pigment I had "made" myself. Even though I had poured off some water that had separated out in the jar when I initially ground the ink, there was a renewed skin of water on the slip and a strange orange red bloom of minerals suspended in it that I poured off before I began. Most of my suspensions are in alcohol and I mix/grind them myself from powdered pigment. This I left in water. In my regular suspensions, when I dip the spoon in to retrieve a bit of pigment, there is little resistance to the spoon and I often don't feel the pigment if the suspension is cloudy. It's not until I lift the spoon out does it become apparent that I have indeed scraped a lump of soft pigment that has fallen to the bottom of the jar. Titanium White (and all of its subsequent tinctures) is notorious for this.
When I dipped the spoon in for some pigment, the mud/water suspension had the resistance of hard jello. I could tell there was a lot of settled clay body in it. I spooned a bit out along with the nori paste and went to work warming up the block. Now, I had pestled this pigment through a fine sieve but not fine enough to take the granules of sand out. The pigment had the consistency of thick yogurt but I could tell there was a bit of sand in it. I have worries that I can only pull so many prints with this before the sand begins to wear down my carving! It is Shina after all. The ink itself prints up a light tan which is pleasantly warm and has only mild whispers of olive. Sadly, it clogs my fine detail and when I add more pigment vs. nori it only prints gummier. I thought back to the pestling stage of the pigment and remembered how the muck liked to wrap itself into a tightening ball form during the end stages of the work. This was disheartening to discover but I have a few more tricks up my sleeve. I washed everything and printed up the rest of the proofs in sumi and thankfully those proofs turned out fine. I'm going to try spreading out my mud pigment in the sun to dry and then grinding it to dust and the suspending it in alcohol to see how that does. I'm hoping that the process will destroy the organic element in there that I am guessing is causing the gumminess. I'm trying to make room for the nori to have its helpful gumminess. I'm also hoping that if that goes all that will be left will be the pigment and that it may print up darker as a concentration in an alcohol suspension. The drying process shouldn't take long as it IS July in VA.

As a last note, I'd like to announce how much I HATE Edgeworthia. Oh my god, I had Edgeworthia. I looked on the McClain's woodblock supply website and they stopped selling it due to its inability to stay consistent from one batch to the next. I'm going to use the Edgeworthia I have for the trilobite editions but I can see right now that this is going to be one massive headache on a large scale. I'm going to invest in a high quality washi for the Limulus. It deserves that much!
UPDATE: I actually had to "cook" the above image for it to come out right. My scanner seems to want to "fix" the image no matter how much I fiddle with the filters and settings. I think it may have something to do with Edgeworthia's gossamer qualities. I had to wash out this image in photo shop because it scanned up crisply with my scanner. I WISH it looked that way in real life but the resulting lack of contrast in this image is closer to what really printed up.

Cook'n up some Ink

2009-07-20T05:47:00.000-07:00

Who wants to lick the bowl?
This weekend I set about making the ink I had planned for the Limulus print. I had scooped out some nice brown mud from the bottom of our hill and let it decompose in a jar in the sun for a few months. I was hoping that it would keep its nice chocolate brown color for this print but I am at the mercy of organic chemistry so we'll see what comes out. I had a large mason jar that I let sit out for a few months hoping to decompose any leaves and sticks that may be in there. It was gross when I rapped it on the porch. Gas bubbles from just under the surface of the mud would belch up and I was apprehensive about taking the lid off.
I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when I took the lid off and drained the top layer of water. I was expecting the smell to reek ungodly but there was no smell save an earthy must when you really stuck your nose in the jar.

All my utensils were lined up on the porch railing ready to go to work. The top layer of the mud was silty and still full of pine needles and bits of leaves. I ran it all through a sieve that I had purchased many moons ago for oil painting. It has been one of the best tools! After the top layer of silt came the grainier layers. I knew it was sand and gravel but the noise sounded like I was grinding glass shards into paste.

I know that much of the soil around my area is high in clay and even though there was a lot of glassy sounding sand and shards of stone in the mix, it all kept gluing itself together into rounded lumps as I spun the pestle against the sieve. I kept adding small amounts of water hoping to unlock the clay from the mass but it didn't seem to want to give. My efforts still yielded a large jar of silt that I hope will be suitable for printing but I worry about the amount of ink I will need to print my enormous wood block with. There was some mud still left in the bottom of the jar by the time I had filled my ink jar to the top so at least I have some reserve if I run low.

I couldn't have asked for a more perfect day to do this and my light green hydrangea tossed its new blooms happily in the breeze as I ground paste. It made me feel like I was a gourmet chef cooking a delectable meal for my most ardent fan. "Why yes ma'am. We use only the most fine ingredients and organic deer poop in this dish."
The final product really did have the consistency of watercolor paint. Here it is at the bottom of my mortar.

I noticed afterwards that the droplets of mud that accidentally got mashed over the side of the mortar kept their shape when they dried so I'm confident that there wasn't too much water and that there was plenty of pigment (clay) in the mix. I am worried though because they color dried out to be an ashy tan and I was really hoping for the retention of the chocolate color. I will not really know what to expect until I run proofs. I am hoping that the nori paste will help with some color retention. My faithful jam company Bonne Maman never fails me. I can't say that I'd buy strawberry jelly if it looked like that. Can you see the trilobites swimming and dancing around in there, waiting to come out?

Lovely Spines

2009-06-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

I’m still plugging away at the Trilobite lineage blocks. I’ve carved two more from the sketches I’ve made. Even though I’m not finished by a long shot there is something so gratifying about this stretch of the project. The massive block I did with the border and horseshoe crab in the middle was very tedious. In the beginning, the copper stars and DNA border seemed fun and challenging but by the end of its completion I was getting repetition sickness! The horseshoe crab was interesting but the jury is still out for me as to whether I should leave it be or try to keep working with the design. With the Trilobites I sketch the image to my liking, carve the block, and then I’m done and can move on to the next trilobite. There’s enough variety for it to continue to be fun.
This little guy featured above is from the Lichida family of Trilobites. His name is Boedaspis ensifer and his head reminds me of a vacuum cleaner. I had fun carving his whip-like extensions.

Here is Eoharpes and will probably be the only Harpetida Trilobite that I will do. The Harpetida family has a few other variants but not distinct enough for me to do more. They mostly all have the same wide helm-like face that reminds me of a Trojan warrior.

20 tiny trilobites

2009-06-09T06:13:00.000-07:00

Say that ten times fast! For the second stretch of the Limulus print I have started the twenty some trilobite blocks that will make up the background around the Limulus. I purchased a "Grab Box" of Shina from McClains back when they were selling grab boxes. I think they only sell bags now so it was a while ago. I've been picking out pieces and trying to figure out how the little guys will fit. Most pieces are no more than about 4 inches on either side so I'm back to my minute pecking out. Actually, the DNA border with the copper stars on each corner required a lot of minute pecking. These will just feel more immediately gratifying because they can be finished within an hour or less. I just have to keep up with the drawings! I only have five drawings completed so far.

Shina is a soft plywood and though it is better than the wood I purchased for the key block there is still a danger of flaking when I get down to the teeny tiny details. I still chase these guys with the wood glue wash. These guys will have a color block for each of them in an aquamarine color so I also have to be careful not to cut the lines too thin or registration will be a small nightmare.

I like how the clearing marks in the background look like sand or water.

Extended Absence

2009-06-07T06:45:00.000-07:00

I must admit that I was shocked myself when I saw that my last update was in April and here it is June already. Several things have happened as of late and they have been steering my path across this rough water we call life.
I finally decided to proof up my Limulus block for better or for worse because a printer really can't decide what to change in the end until the print has been pulled. Here it is sitting on a table "warming up" with baths of water mist. Normally when I print I have a sheet or two of paper towel under a block to keep the moisture even on both sides so the block won't torque. This project is so big that I use a damp terri cloth towel to keep everything balanced. I proofed it up in bokuju but the final print will be a brown that I am working on made from soil in my indigenous area.

I found with this project that printing is quite a challenge. *Sigh* I purchased an enormous amount of Edgeworthia about 5 years ago before I learned that no, patrons do not turn out in droves to purchase woodblock prints (at least not my prints) and that no you shouldn't really print big editions until you begin to sell because then you have no money for new barens and brushes because you spent it all in paper. Lesson learned. Anyway, the edition is going to be printed on Edgeworthia which is admittedly not my most favorite of papers because for me it is very fussy. My friend Murray Whitehill was helping me and documenting with his camera as I printed. As you can see here, mutating into an octopus wouldn't be a bad idea as you can run out of hands and arms while trying to maneuver large sheets of wet paper. Murray produces really great photography and his most recent project is photographing artists as they work with a concentration on their hands. It's a great experience seeing all these hands in different media and it's become a game to me to try and figure out who the hands belong too! You can see more of Murray's work at www.MWhitehill.com and please do because he's got a lot of neat stuff!

Here is a proof coming off the block. I didn't get a whole lot of good ones because the Edgeworthia was too wet and wicking fibers all over the place. It's neat to see it coming off the block though. I am somewhat daunted by the fact that I will need registration for the next block as I have never printed this big and the bigger you go the harder it is to register finite detail.

Here is a proof of the Limulus block. I am resting my eyes a bit while I concentrate on creating and carving the family of trilobites that will surround the Limulus. I am a little dissatisfied with it but for negligible reasons. The boarder feels clunky to me but I know that it is fine because the proof is sloppy but the carving was tight and I am used to doing these small scale intricate carvings. It impresses me more when I view it from afar. Then it looks like all kinds of crazy detail. The other thing that bothers me is the shading of the Limulus. I feel like it still needs hatching but I am afraid to go any further. The wood will only allow so much before hatching turns into white area. I am telling myself that I can't make any changes until I'm finished carving the trilobites. Perhaps by that time the horseshoe crab will not appear so crude to me.

Dragon Books

2009-04-13T07:26:00.000-07:00

Well, I have at least 7 books worth of book cover designs printed up and resting on my drying rack. This photo was tweaked a little bit in photoshop as one of my fluorescent lights on my drafting table washed the gold and burgundy hues out to a silvered gold against chocolate type pallet. This image is similar to what the real thing looks like. I didn't bother with the scanner as it usually doesn't do well with light reflecting metallics.
After I had measured out the pieces of paper to cut from one big sheet, I labored over the decision to draw a "registration panel" on the back of each one with a bone folder. As with all producers the question is whether or not such a step will interfere with the price of the final product. Will spending enough time to bone folder each and every print for registration really leave me with a comfortable feeling about pricing each book at $25.00? I finally decided that if I didn't do this step it would effect the price in that it would take me longer to measure each individual print after the fact. I was glad I did it because one set of papers was an eighth of an inch shorter than the rest. This would not effect the end quality of the book but it would be a beast to register during gluing. As with all handmades, the prints themselves jogged ever so slightly in registration due to the fact that registration guides were temporarily taped to the original papers instead of sacrificing an inch of paper. Having laid out my registration panels though made the job easier as now I only have to account for little adjustments lining up the papers for gluing to the boards. Binding will be another story all together. It is more a methodical practice, coptic binding. You simply sit down on the porch on a nice day or play your favorite album and commence sewing. I even think that maybe I will bring some unfinished ones to the market so that people will be able to watch me make the books. We'll see. There is also the matter of the stamp. I will be carving stamps to place on the inside of each first and last page as a sort of seal. The will be at least 3"X3" I hope.
I have been timidly going about the business of carving the Limulus itself. I am very afraid of screwing up the image after dealing so carefully with the detailed border. I found a few images of specimen Limulus that look like they've been shellacked to have a permanently wet looking surface. My goal was to generally carve out hunks of white highlights and then soften everything in with delicate hatching. As usual I got ahead of myself and did a bit of detailing in the shell.

I wasn't sure how the wood would hold up to the finite crosshatching but I had gone over it with a few glue washes and it has done surprisingly well.

At this stage I was unhappy with how it looked. I was thinking it was starting to look like half a vinyl record. I ignored such thoughts and pushed on. I finally carved out the entire shellfish and cut a few more hunks of highlight material out. Tomorrow I'm going to focus on more finite detailing and hopefully by this Saturday I may be able to pull a proof! I will be very excited at that prospect!

Limulus emerging

2009-04-05T16:28:00.000-07:00

Well, I am very much excited to have finished the DNA border on my Limulus print. I started this print in January and here spring is to usher me on to the final stages of this block! Today I cleared out much of the surrounding wood from the border and carved the perimeter of the Limulus' shell. You can see the myriad of wood used to construct this piece of plywood and each piece has been a pain in my ass. None the less they were each one a lesson learned. I'm going to be carving out the Limulus itself on Tuesday and I'm a bit nervous about that. The border was hard because there was so much detail and repetition that is was more of an exercise in endurance than anything else. The horseshoe crab I want to approach just right so that the intricate border is complimented by a skillfully executed subject. I will be referencing woodblock artists who have carved dark pieces but still conveyed depth. The border is mostly lines with some solid shapes but the horseshoe crab will be mostly solid shape with white lines conveying depth. Like I said.... I'm nervous!
Those two lung shaped pieces on either side of the Limulus' tail will stay. I am leaving those large pieces in to help support the damp paper when I go to print. I am hoping that this will also registration as the paper won't sag out of register as much with those extra supports. I have had the experience that when leaving such pieces, an errant pressure from the baren will leave a tell tale mark from the edge. I have gone over the edges with a sanding block so that the supports will hopefully not print up.
Finally, the block was christened today when I drove my shallow u-gouge into a cranky spot and busted a knuckle. You know a print will turn out good if it draws blood.

You shall have your Proof!

2009-03-28T21:51:00.000-07:00

I cracked up at Diana Moll's comment on my last post. She spurred me on to finish the block and pull a proof before I called it a night! The proof is definitely a proof. I purchased some burgandy/wine colored paper for the book covers but the gold dust is still the shade that I will be using. This chinese red color is just a piece I had laying around. The color is okay but way too obvious for me. I didn't want to use a bright red because the chinese dragons would imply a "chinese restaurant feel" to me. It's definitely firey!

Here is the block locked up on the press bed ready for a slathering of ink. I couldn't decide whether or not to use a tinted ink or just tint base. I have decided for the books to just go with tint base. The colored paper is so dark that it will not be necessary to use any of my pigments for a "back up color".

Here is the print fresh off the press. The sticky tint base really shows.

Now we get to play in the gold dust! Static in the air really carried the particles so I'll need to don a face mask when I get ready for the real deal.
Pretty good for a days work I would say. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm finding it hard to type as my vermouth spiked peach cider is inhibiting my typing capabilities! Going to go pass out in bed now and dream of dragons dancing in flames...

Two Dragons One Pearl

2009-03-24T20:48:00.001-07:00

I started this little number while I carve the Limulus block. When I get tired of carving wood I begin to pluck linoleum and visa versa. This project is also a farmer's market venture. I LOVE books with beautiful covers depicting mysterious places and curious things and I am hoping that someone else will too. I have decided to design three book covers for journals that capture this enthusiasm and go further if the market allows. They will all be key block images that will be inked up in tint base and then dusted with gold or silver powder to create a gilded look. I have a deep red paper for this image and it will be dusted in gold. I'm also excited to use my Vandercook for this. I LOVE using my presses. This block image has given me some relief from the Limulus print as I'm starting to go stir crazy with the DNA and geometrical stars. The repetition is mind numbing and I have a feeling it has contributed to my recent clumsiness. The organic shapes of the twisting dragons with their snarling teeth and liquid flames and helped relieve my brain of the monotony in the Limulus border. I can't wait to finish it and proof it up!

The Weasel will seek any way in....

2009-03-22T07:40:00.000-07:00

Ah, the time honored tradition of artists seeking any means to subsidize their income....
Our local Farmer's Market in Charlottesville, VA is ready to start up in April and I would like to try to get in on it to experience what it is like! I learned a good deal from the "Holiday Market" that they held last this past winter on the downtown mall. Lesson number one: I hate cold weather. Lesson number two: People generally don't understand what a block print is or what printmaking entails. I didn't give the Holiday Market a fair try as I only sat for one day but sitting outside all day in the freezing cold on the advent of a snow storm with a total of two customers was not my idea of success. I am looking forward to the summer market though because I love sunshine and fresh vegetables! People didn't really know how to approach my stand with prints and framed works in the winter. They sort of treated it like a gallery and viewed the work and made comments but no real interest in sales. For this summer market I'm focusing only on "pedestrian" materials like journals, cards, and such. To begin with there will be only two products for sale just to see how things go. Those two products will be "Upcycled Cork Stamps" and "Hard Bound Journals".
I completed the display for some cork stamps that I made yesterday. It was so much fun to get this project together! I collect corks from bottles of wine that we drink over time and I had collected 28 before I really knew what I wanted to do with them. I designed a simple box template that I stamp my information on the front of and a sample image of the completed stamp on top. After I complete an image, I stamp it on the top of the box and in my "Stamp Morgue" book to record its existence and then wrap it in tissue paper and stuff it into the little box to await a new owner! I had made a small box full of them and could foresee that lining them up on a flat table was not my idea of successful display....especially if the wind kicked up. I sat down and sketched out a rudimentary design for a vertical display stand and set about assembling it out of odds and ends of foam core and cardboard that I had ferreted away over time. After much tweaking an adjusting, I covered the whole thing in glue soaked craft paper. The boxes fit perfect and reminded me a lot of old country store displays with their lithograph label boxes and sparkling bottles of tinctures! I had a cork stamp that I had carved a few months ago that I fell in love with and I set about stamping out little birds to paste all over the box so that it would still look good after the products were sold! I will also be bringing the stamp with me to show people what it looks like and how well they work. I made the sign out of different papers I liked and hand wrote the script. The sign detaches so that it will travel better. I will say that I just know that after sitting in the sun the nice bright colors will fade but at least I have a photo record of what it looked like. I hope that when I do get out there that I will see all those little birds I pasted onto the display by the time I leave!

On and on...

2009-03-18T18:56:00.000-07:00

Yep, still chipp'n away at the horse shoe crab block. I think I got a little "factory fever" with the repetitive carving of the stars and DNA patterns. Before I knew it, I had screwed up major bad. I was habitually plowing through the end section of the longer side of one of the DNA strands and went right into my star pattern without realizing what I was doing. Lesson: If you're tired, stop carving. Anyway, I don't know why I tried to fill in such a large hole with wood filler but I did. I knew as I locked the studio door that night that it was a stupid idea. I even lay awake that night thinking that it wouldn't work and I was just going to have to go in and fix it. Yes, I lay awake and think about these things. Anyway, I came in and made this plug for the wound. I admit I initially tried to carve into the filler and it crumbled just as I anticipated. Normally, a plug would be wedged into the shaped hole in a block and then leveled off but because this is a piece of shit plywood board I had to hand carve and sand a small plug of shina plywood. It actually worked great (or so I think until I proof it up!). By the way, I tried out a new brand of wood filler, Elmer's, instead of Dap. Yeah, that stuff is crap. It just doesn't haven't the body I'm looking for so I guess I'll be heading into the hardware store to get more Dap.

Using crap wood is always an interesting adventure. In one of the Kirin blocks, I was carving along and found area of glitter plastered in between the layers of plywood. Here is a curious stain at the top of the block. It was probably a marker of some sort as the wood made its way to lamination. Some areas are just a straight up pain in the ass:

This is a rather large strip of black striations in a layer of the plywood. The wood gets tough and brittle in these areas and I find I have to hone the knives more frequently than usual. That white patch is the wood filler that had to be plastered into an area that just wasn't there at all. Holes are always a pain. Water can get in and spread who knows where in your image to create rot or the pressure from printing can even cause "sink holes" in your image.

Lastly, when an area is "finished" I brush on some watered down wood glue to shore up the weak wood. I'm beginning to wonder if this is the best idea as it will affect the absorption of water during the printing process but I really have no choice. If I don't do something to shore up all the detail, I feel that the block will degrade before I even finish pulling color proofs. Either way, there is more than one way to skin a cat. If it refuses to print moku hanga style, I have a can of oil based ink and a brayer at the ready!

Got a camera now!

2009-02-14T20:43:00.001-08:00

Yay! The cable finally came and I was able to download the images I have been snapping in the studio. This is a foreshortened view of the DNA border I have chosen for my Limulus print. I believe the entire length is just under 40" and was probably the hardest part of the border to carve. The intricate star was easier for some reason.

The repetition is enough to make you go cross eyed. I'm hoping my next print of this size will be easier as the board is a lot more organic.

Here is a close up of the kento. I am afraid that it is too close and that I may have to have a smaller brush just for inking that part but that was the limit of my paper so my options are limited as well. There are 14 points on the star and there are 14 electrons in the last naturally occurring valence shell in an atom. Copper is missing 3 of these electrons and this illustrated by the dark shading in three of the spokes on the star. DNA would appear to emanate from two of each spoke to create a boarder around the Limulus. This is my attempt at symbolizing that Limulus blood contains copper and that copper atoms and Limulus DNA share a relationship that maintains the animal. I am in love with Islamic tile work and geometric patterns and I took inspiration from this to create the stained glass looking star. I am also in the process of creating a painting to go with this series.

Lastly, here is my cheap answer to my back issue. Leaning over and carving on this thing can be a real bitch. The box helps a little (until I have to move the block) and the handle on the make shift table I'm using is good as a sort of bench hook. The table is really actually a massive wooden box. I'm guessing it used to ship munitions or maybe lighting equipment or something but these days it stores my paper and acts as my carving/printing station.

The Year of the Ox

2009-02-10T16:15:00.000-08:00

I hope I don't ruin it for anyone but I had to post an image of my Year of the Ox Exchange block. I had done two sketches but couldn't decide which one to do. I had a design with a musk ox but last minute I had a gut inclination to go with my Nandi sketch. Nandi is the name of the white Brahman Bull that Shiva rides. Nandi means "joyful."
I grew up helping my father with our beef cattle and I have an affinity for livestock. When we would go out to feed the cows it was fun to see the calves jumping and skipping in the field and when the feed came out the cows would jump and skip too as they raced to our truck. It was rare to see the bull jump or skip because he pretty much just shoved where he wanted to go so I guess he didn't get much excited about anything.... except a cow in heat maybe. Anyways, The god Nandi just seemed perfect for the Year of the Ox because we need an excuse to be joyful and because I just love Brahman cattle. I love that hump and the droopy ears! I wanted a dynamic pose and I'm wondering now if I didn't just end up doing a Schlitz malt liquor ad.
I would later like to do a few color blocks but now time is of the essence so I'll pick out a color other than black and get them bulls a moving so they can joyfully skip off to their new homes!

Camera Crippled!

2009-02-04T19:18:00.000-08:00

This whole not having a camera around to document what I'm doing is driving me nuts! Poor little camera wants so bad to take a picture but alas his little mechanism is broken so he just clicks and clicks photos of black. My mom did what all moms do and is insisting that I use HER camera in its place... except for the fact that she has no idea where the USB cable ran off too. She just pops the memory card into her printer slot. We tried that but for some reason it won't register in my husbands printer and I just don't feel like playing network tag every time I want to blog. Luckily, seedy New Jersey is there for me and a hot little USB cable is on it's way to me from Ebay. Anyways, I REALLY REALLY REALLY want to update you guys on the Limulus block because it's turning out nicely but alas we must await the arrival of the cable.

Although my camera is out of commission, my scanner is not! I have a total of 22 drawings to complete for stage two of the Limulus print (whew!) and I am learning things about trilobites that I didn't think I would even need to but soak up I shall! (I have since learned that my rendering of trilobite legs in my future watercolor is all wrong AND I need to add two antennae!) Above is an example of creature from the Corynexochida family. It looks more like your "average" trilobite except for the half moon fused shell on his rump. It's kind of like the curvature of an old WWII American soldier helmet.

Through most of my drawing trilobites I notice that a face shield is what comes natural when rendering these animals. This is guy from the Harpetida family is pretty much all helmet! I would usually find a lot of varieties within the families and only choosing two from each is hard but pretty much all the members in this family look like this which is probably the reason this will be the only Harpetida member you will find in the final Limulus print. Something about the shape reminds me of a Trojan helmet.

Remember WWII Helmet Butt? Yeah, this is a distant cousin from the same family. This seems to be the "catfish" in the family. Its wide angle face spread out like an old vacuum cleaner and three prominent whiskers leaning back over it. The rump has shrunk and grown a feathery tail feather that shifts with the currents of the waters.
Zach asked me what kind of wood the Limulus print would be and what kind of ink I was going to use. I think the label at Home Depot said "Cheap ass shit you ought to know better than to buy but you're broke as a joke so buy it anyway". Seriously, I have no idea (don't remember!) but it sure carves crappily. I have to constantly be aware of the grain and the finished places receive a total of three wood glue washes if not more just to shore everything up. I took a proof on a different carving that I'm using the same wood with and it seems to print okay so I'm just crossing my fingers!
About the ink, it's going to be printed Moku Hanga style and I'm going to try using ink made from dirt from my back yard and ashes from my sister's wood stove to make a chocolate colored ink. It will be interesting because my dirt is a heavy iron oxide. I need a hot day to cook out the microorganisms and so far that isn't happening so we'll see.

The Trilobite

2009-01-26T07:41:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I've posted. My camera pooped out a week or so ago and I haven't been able to find a replacement yet. So, I'm relegated to what I can fit under a scanner bed.
I am at work carving the Limulus print and though it is satisfying carving out the little details, it's a bit stressful. The economy being what it is I had to buy a cheap piece of plywood for this large print. The top veneer is very soft and the grain cleaves together so tiny details can flake away without warning. I've tried to remedy this with a few washes of water proof wood glue and this seems to be helping so I'm just going to cross my fingers and have at it.
My Limulus key block consists of a detailed border and a single large Limulus (horseshoe crab) in the middle. I plan to have several small trilobite blocks printed around in the back ground and getting around to sketching the designs for them has been like pulling teeth.
Yesterday, I finally decided to bite the bullet and sit down and design at least one trilobite. I recognized that one of my sticking points is that I am intimidated be the variety of form with the trilobites and though I am familiar with their general shape I still needed some important information on their design. (This was also a sticking point in the Limulus design!) I printed several images off the internet and actually bought a small trilobite fossil from a local jewelry shop. My study last night proved helpful. I am starting to recognize key features that every trilobite must have. I also pick out flaws in my own little sample. Poor little Moroccan Trilobite sample! Someone accidentally chipped off some of his eye! :(
At any rate, this sketch on water color paper is the result of the study. Pretty much all the specimens of trilobites that you see are a single color of black, grey, brown, or tan-whatever stone they happen to be incased in. I thought it would be fun to dress this guy up in some contemporary coloring to set him apart from his buddies so we'll see how this progresses!

Limulus polyphemus

2009-01-10T19:40:00.000-08:00

I am in the beginning stages of an edition of prints I'm thinking about calling "Limulus". It is going to be similar in lay out and size to a piece I wrote about a few months ago called "Archeopteris". Limulus polyphemus is the scientific name for the Horseshoe Crab. I was reading up on it for my design and one scientist's argument was that we should not refer to the animal as a Horseshoe Crab because it is not as closely related to the crab family as the name would let on. It is instead more closely related to spiders as it resides in the Arthopod family. My initial intention for creating this print was to honor the longevity of the Limulus. I knew it was an old animal and its physical appearance has remained virtually unchanged through the eons. What I did not know was that the oldest Limulus fossil found to date is roughly 445 million years old. That puts it in the middle of the Ordovician period which is the period directly following the Cambrian period. They have survived 5 major mass extinction events. I am amazed that the animals have persisted for so long. I was also researching distant cousins of the Limulus, the Trilobites. These guys arrived during the Cambrian and exploded into a diversity of shapes during the Ordovician but were slowly cut down by mass extinction events. A sad "last gasp" example is the Devonian period that my "Archeopteris" print takes place in. There remained 6 families of Trilobites from the 16 that resided in the last period. After the Devonian period only one solitary family remained until the end of the Permian finally killed it off. I will add Trilobites into the background of the Limulus print later. They will be prominent and diverse at the bottom of the print and then less so towards the top, mirroring time.

I wanted the over all feeling of the print to be one of an old manuscript or religious stella and was unsure how to create the border that would emphasize that. I found out that the Limulus has a copper based blood in contrast to our human iron based blood. I also found out that the pharmaceutical industry uses the blood to test IV drugs for endotoxins. So, we owe a great deal to the Limulus for the prevention of disease from tainted IV drugs.
I now had the knowledge I needed to create a fitting border for my print. The double helix of DNA would span the sides and 4 stained glass stars would frame the corners. The stars represent the copper atom which has an atomic number of 29. Atoms have levels of electrons called valence shells. Since the atomic number is 29, it is missing 3 electrons to complete the number 14 in its last valence shell. The stars have 14 points with three dark points, 2 of which are ejecting the material to make Limulus DNA.
This will be a new experience for me as far as printing. The image will be roughly 22" X 36" and will be printed on Edgeworthia. I must admit I am not a fan of Edgeworthia but I have plenty of it and I hope it will prefer to be a Limulus print rather that stay in my paper storage!

Un-Enrollment

2008-12-28T08:32:00.000-08:00

I'm planning a large scale woodblock print about the longevity of the Horseshoe Crab and I needed to educate myself about a few things including Trilobites. One thing I learned is that Trilobites (a long extinct race of sea creatures that flourished during the Cambrian and Ordovician time periods) practice what is called "enrollment" when threatened. They tuck most of their bodies up under their shelly shield-like heads and wait until they can safely unroll again. There are even matching grooves in their exoskeletons where their front and back ends can lock together like a jigsaw puzzle.
The point is I hate the camera. I avoid getting my picture taken when I can. I had a woodblock printing demonstration for my art center's open house and my husband took photos. I guess I will unroll now and put pictures of myself on the internet. It was a lot of fun and people seemed to like seeing the prints come off of the blocks. It's nice to share that moment and see complete strangers share the excitement that you experience in the studio when pulling prints. I normally don't print Moku Hanga style on my Pilot Press table but it was right in front of the door and I wanted people to have a straight shot glance from the door that something cool was going on in Studio Zero! Kids really enjoyed the process and I wish I could teach the block printing to that age level but knives and kids don't mix. Anyway, a good time was had by all and the weather was nice. I just love the light that spills into my studio through those windows!

The familiar taste of Crow

2008-12-14T18:37:00.000-08:00

Well, as I recall, I was going to letterpress in the title of the "Diospyros Virginiana Quatrefoil" as I was not going to right it 50 or 60 times. I have a beautiful set of type I purchased from NA Graphics called Franciscan that I have never used and now was the time to play with it....until I realized I was spacing material poor. I didn't have a scrap of 16 point spacing material to save my life and there was no money for a set (which probably goes for about 100.00 now). I'll just have to rub my pennies together for another day. So, I sat down at the table and began the editing process and it turns out that I only had to write "Diospyros Virginiana Quatrefoil" 30 times. Sadly, only 30 made it from 50 sheets of paper because I was paying more attention to people walking around the studio and asking questions than the edition printing. No matter, I will recycle them in some sort of creative way. There were some cute kids that came and went throughout the day and one of them even dug a reject print out of my paper recycling and said "Can I have this? I could draw on it or something." I told him that he should just go right on ahead and that that was a very good idea. I will post another blog entry of photos from the demonstration just as soon as I can get the nerve up to look at photos of myself. Man, I hate the camera. :)
Here is a comparison photo of the persimmons painting versus the persimmons print.

Ready for the last block!

2008-12-10T20:31:00.000-08:00

Well, it has taken me three days to get to this point and now I will rest! I am leaving the final key block (brown outline of the persimmons) for my demonstration on Saturday. Not much is left to the imagination at this point though and these are intriguing without the outline but I'm hoping the outline with "seal the deal so to speak". Hopefully, I can print the titles for these on Sunday but that is if all goes well. This past Saturday I only had time for one impression although I had intended on doing three. In the middle of printing, I got a phone call from my brother in-law asking me if I would attend his wife's birthday party that night. Well, I very well couldn't miss that. She is carrying triplets and you have to give it up for a lady that can do that!
The first impression was a wash made of nori and a golden yellow. It was pale just like the under wash of the painting.

On Sunday, I started the first bokashi again with the golden yellow wash (which was barely noticeable, bleh). For reasons I can't remember, I then printed the light blue parts of the geometric background. I think the light colored shapes were messing with my head and I needed the blue to feel more grounded. After I printed the light brown colored calyx, I called it a night. I had carved little highlight dots in the calyx block to give some contrast. They were very tiny and I knew they would be hard to print. Some came out and some did not but it really didn't matter to me. My paper was still wet when I left on Sunday night and I stayed home on monday but I had turned the thermostat back in my studio so that it would remain cool. I don't worry about mold taking place in the winter but paper disintegration was another matter all together. But when I returned on Tuesday all was well. I think I had sixty some sheets of paper printed up and I started out looking at them like "Ugh, my back is killing me but here we go."

I printed the golden yellow bokashi and then a strong orange and the fruits really started to glow off the page. It was a wonderful experience! Another bokashi of burnt orange and the cobalt geometric background and I have reached the point that is pictured above. I could barely feel my legs and tail bone after that though. My studio is entirely on concrete and I had to stretch constantly while printing to keep my joints from fusing. I recommend Sam & Dave or Aretha Franklin to set the speed! Now, I know someone is just dying to point out that I need to make one of those nifty little tables to print at and I will not deny that it is on my wish list but 1. I need sharpening stones before that 2. there is no more room left in my studio and lastly and chiefly 3. my clutch gave out in my '98 Honda so ain't nobody gett'n nuth'n for christmas this year.

What got into me?

2008-12-01T17:50:00.000-08:00

I have NO IDEA!!!! But I like it!! After two weeks of fussing around with the fig stuff I'm blowing through work on the persimmon! This is the original sketch all painted up! Now it really looks like stained glass. I might revisit this effect as it's rater fun. The "stained glass" lines (measurements lines) will not show up in the print and I wonder if that will detract but I'm not concerned at the moment.

Just wanted to share the image of my desktop. Note the funny little pan of dimples with color. This turned out to be a great color pallet that is very convenient too. It was used as packing for something about a year ago when my husband bought computer supplies. It wasn't recyclable and I hate to continue to accrue things I don't need but his came very in handy. After I finished the painting I was able to pull some proofs of the persimmon block to make color blocks.

I left my bokuju ink at the studio and had some thinner sumi ink instead. I had a bad experience once with a bottle of indian ink I did all but weld the top onto but it bleed everywhere into my bag anyway during transit. If ink was to be spilled, I didn't want it to be my bokuju! This stuff was a lot runnier and the initial prints show it but after warming the block up a little and letting the paper air out a little things tightened up. Here is the proof of the persimmon. Tomorrow is color block carving day!!

Know thy self

2008-12-01T06:52:00.000-08:00

Words to live by....so my figs painting burnt me out. Not that I may not come back to it but it makes me sick to look at it for the moment.
Last year I had an open house at the McGuffey Art Center with all sorts of food and wine and it was fun while it lasted. Less to participate in McGuffey's annual open house, it was more of an opportunity for family and friends to come see my new studio. After it was all over and I was scrubbing punch and candy off the floor, I thought to myself that I would not be doing this again next year. Haha. So, I will be participating in McGuffey's open house but instead of having food I will be displaying all my artworks and hopping to jazz the place up (as much as possible anyways) to look like a small gallery. I will be doing a Japanese Woodblock Printing demo from 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm. People usually don't know anything about printmaking and this would definitely be a treat for them to see what Moku Hanga entails.
I subscribe to a few magazines because I enjoy their aesthetic for the most part. Two of my favorites are Country Living and Domino and one of them recently featured an article on persimmons that focused on a local industry here in Nelson County, VA called Edible Landscaping. Trouble is I can't remember which one. At any rate, the graphics done for the article were beautiful and they shot some asian persimmons resting on some geometric textiles. I was struck by the beauty of the calyx on the fruit. The leafy area around the stem of a fruit is usually not noteworthy but the beautiful wooden flower that rims the persimmon is quite attractive. Because we have a indigenous species of persimmon here in Virginia and because I am in love with Islamic art and architecture, I thought this would be a perfect print for the opening. It was until I lost the article.
Confident that I needed the article in order to complete my "perfect" design, I set the project aside and set about designing a new print. I wanted to illustrate to people that for Moku Hanga the completed image (painting) comes first. (Know thy self!) This was not my process so of course I got bored with my fig FAST! For me, unless I really need to know what is going down for registration, I normally sketch something then carve it and figure out the colors later. I usually do paintings as a way to get instant gratification and to relax. I normally do not get the urge to make a print run for a painting. In fact, for the Book of Life project, I am making some paintings as a tool for color block orientation. So the intention of a print is driving the creation of a painting not vice versa. While taking yet another break from from painting the blasted fig, I leafed through one of my Domino magazines and an article on quatrefoils popped up. My mind was made up at that moment that I was going to do a persimmon print come hell or high water!

With the help of Google I found some native virginia persimmons to sketch and sat down with a ruler and compass and fiddled around with some geometrical designs. I whipped it into my scanner, flipped it backwards in photoshop, viola! I carved the persimmon key yesterday. There will be five blocks and one or two bokashi on the fruit. Today I'm waiting for some mulberry to soak up water to pull the registration proofs for colors. I don't have the heart to erase my measure marks. They look like stained glass so I think I will leave them.

Okay, so as always there is a danger of cutting oneself but I must admit I take a little pride in this one. I have a large shallow U-gouge I use for clearing that I had bought from McClain's a few years back. There is a metal ferrule at the end for a mallet but my block was so small and made of shina I figured I could just push it through. It was like putting a hot knife in butter! At one point, I had the knife in the wood with one hand and I stopped to pull my shirt collar out. As I held the knife forward, I drew my hand back to grab my collar and my finger slid over the top corner of the knife. I didn't feel any pain but as I continued to carve my finger started to itch. I checked and sure enough I had accidentally cut myself. No biggie but I am proud that after years of care my blade is still surgically sharp!

Holiday Figs

2008-11-24T17:02:00.000-08:00

So, I need to have a piece to print for the Holiday Open House at the McGuffey Art Center when my demonstration goes down in Studio Zero at 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm on December 13th. If this isn't ready then I'll drag out an old woodblock but I like to have something fresh going on. This has got to be one of the worst scans I've done but this is the design for a piece called "Figs" that I want to print. I stopped at this point because I broke one of my cardinal rules and that is not to do any color work at night because my cones have just about had it. I'm not too worried about it though because I started painting when the sun was up and haven't wandered very far in my pallet. The image is about 3.75" X 3.75". After about 4 hours of painting, I have completed a few leaves and two fruit. Sad isn't it? Actually, I'm not sure those two fruit are in the final stages but that is where I will leave them until tomorrow. At any rate, all this insane Vermeer style painting is not going to be reflected in the print. That is not my goal with this print but it will illustrate the differences between painting and print and how both are beautiful in their own right. I could do a photo-intense print with all sorts of bokashi and such but 1. I need to get to gett'n on my New Years exchange designs and my July show work and 2. there is no way that would be ready in time for the demo! Can't wait to finish the painting though..... maybe in sixty years with my 3 haired brush...... maybe I should be committed!

McGuffey Holiday Open House!

2008-11-20T10:29:00.000-08:00

On December 13, 2008, the McGuffey Art Center will be having a Holiday Open House from 10:00am until 4:00pm! There will be open studios, activities for the kids, light refreshments, demonstrations, loads of handmade gifts in the gift store, and the entire building is plastered with wonderful works of art from our McGuffey Member Artists! I will be hosting an open studio with tons of my work available from everything to stocking stuffers to one of a kind artist books and paintings. Come see the cut tree books in person! It's like walking through a snowy forest! I will also be demonstrating the process of Japanese Woodblock Printing in the afternoon. Come on down and enjoy the holiday fun!

Farm People in Ink

2008-11-18T19:06:00.001-08:00

Well, the print came out well but the journey there was hell. In shopping around, I decided to support Graphic Chemical as opposed to just an "art" store. What I'm about to say will amount to a fluke in production that is not related Graphic Chemical as a company, rather, shame on Speedball. I transferred a few of my drawings onto lino-blocks and began cutting away at the work horse one. While carving, I began to get a funny sensation when I carved in certain areas. It didn't take long before I would start to hear a fibrous pulling sound when revisiting these areas. I stopped carving and held my block up to eye level so I could see the sides. Sure enough, there were little dark gaps riddling the burlap layer around the entire perimeter of the block. I tugged at the sides and both ends of linoleum popped up from the block. The middle remained somewhat fixed to the block but in hind site I should have pulled the whole thing off. I was afraid to at the time because I wasn't sure I could get it registered on the block right. Apparently, there was too little glue laid down to adhere the linoleum to the wood. In some places, there was simply none. I slathered the ends with wood glue and let it rest under some books for a day before I resumed carving.
My original intent was to use these sets of blocks to print on the blank sides of envelopes. Why oh why did I ever come up with that idea. Trying to set that up on the pilot was a nightmare. (Anyone who has ever run a platen press will tell you that they hate broad areas of pigment and they hate multiple layers of opposing paper.... like envelopes.) Anytime I would go to print the layers would hazily read through the image. I had three options: 1. unfold a few hundred envelopes, print, then re-glue 2. adhere tiny registration tabs to a few hundred envelopes and then run them through my hand roll Vandy 3. abandon the project for the moment and just do a straight collectible print edition. Option 3 was looking better and better since unfolding and re-gluing a few hundred envelopes was hardly worth 1.50 an envelope and I'm not even going to address hand rolling and registration tabs on that one. In the end, a lot of sweet talk to the Pilot press yielded my Work Horse in print. And, boy, did he make me work for it. Now I'm going to go enjoy a nice hot cup of cocoa with creme de menthe.

More Farm People!

2008-11-02T07:51:00.000-08:00

I have to say that this project is so much fun! I try to spend as little time on it as I am engrossed in the Book of Life project but it is such a treat to render these creatures and a great way to blow off steam. I do have to reference photos for animal conformation and I just love period clothing from the twenties and thirties. In my undergrad years at the Corcoran, we had a professor that did hours at a local library. Amazingly, there was a lot of turn over in their stacks. She would bring in boxes and boxes of books that were not popular or damaged. I got quite a few priceless books from those piles. One of them that I have been using for reference for period clothing is titled "A True Likeness (The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts: 1920-1936)." There are such a diversity of images in that book. One page is a couple decked out in lavish furs and suits, another is a baby in a wash basin, another would be a family of share croppers, another might be a death portrait. It's a great book to check out.
This project is not only rewarding because I get to decide which animals and breeds I will be doing but it's also fun to decide what they will wear! This dapper gentleman has a watch fob because I figured that nothing would be more attractive to a chicken than a sparkly watch fob and spectacle chain. I love how his saddle feathers drape over his folded "arm".

I wanted the bull to look sharp and snappy for obvious reasons that he is the "ruler" of the farm. There is a reason that every farmer tells you not to "mess with the bull." The problem I've run into is that other than his spats, your can't really tell he has on period clothing. There is not enough room on my block for a fedora. This brings me to the conclusion that they must've gotten it spot on in the twenties if a snappy men's suit hasn't changed much since then! I'm curious to see how it will turn out because I want his suit to be a dark pin stripe with a white tie. It will be an Angus (black) bull so I hope the image won't turn out too dark. I'm not that worried.

There was a lot of unconscious imagery going on in the broodie hen image. Halfway through drawing it I realized that I was referencing my grandmother for the imagery. As a good southern family, we went to church every Sunday when I was growing up and my sister and I had to ALWAYS wear a slip or petticoat. Kids don't care about their appearance and my grandmother or mother was always tugging at our skirts hissing "Your petticoat is showing!" In her later years, we always teased our grandmother about that when her skirt was accidentally hitched up. I hated those damn things. Anyway, there were three of us kids and she was always scolding and clucking after us like a broodie hen.....a smoking, swearing broodie hen. Ah, the south! A petticoat under the hen's scalloped dress would have been too repetitious so I dressed her up in pantaloons. Believe it or not, some people still wore those things in the 80's. Not my grandma. Those are definitely her legs though because she always wore shoes like that.

Lastly, I cracked up the whole time I was drawing this one. Surprisingly, it was hard to find good swine images through Google Images. I was looking for the old fashioned images you used to find of hogs with folds in their faces and their ears flopping over. Mostly what I was finding were images of industry standard pigs. I didn't realize that different breeds were bred for certain things like bacon vs. ham. All you vegetarians out there cover your ears. People don't realize the danger of picking only one breed of animal to provide the world's meat and risking inbreeding and genetic degeneration. I'll go off on that tangent later. Not only was their a lack of diversity but there were also images mixed in under titles that were not what I was looking for. "Fat hog face" search brought up more images of human women than pigs.....anyways. I scraped a few (two) images off the internet and went on memory. An interesting thing I found out in making my fat hog look more piggish is that I didn't realize that the animal had such an upturned jaw. This got more pronounced as it gained weight and shoved folds of fat onto its face. The belly with the cinched pants button was not hard to draw. You see a lot of that in America and I admit I've been there myself. My big old fatty-fat piggy was hilarious to draw!
I can't wait to do more!

Book of Life: Page One

2008-10-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

I am very excited to post about the first page of the Book of Life! This is just a proof and there are things that happened during proofing that I need to go back and fix but as a printer, these are the moments I live for. I hope no one thinks I am boasting but when I pulled the first impression off the block it felt like I was instantly whisked back in time to old Europe in a print shop where I could see through Albrecht Dürer's eyes. You spend all this time breathing life into a woodblock and then during printing, in an instant, it breaths life into you! Very rewarding.
The few fixes I will make that catch my eye are the shallow scuffing that prints up in the sun's rays, the errant scuffing in the border, and rework the shadow of the storm on the water so that the transition is not so blunt and heavy. Other than that, I am in love! And it only gets better as I figure out which color blocks I would like to make!
And now for a lesson in give and take. There will be two editions from this series. I love black and white prints but I also love color prints. One of the effects I wish to imbue to the reader of this book is the feeling of time and the ancient feeling associated with woodblocks while at the same time having the subject matter being relative to today's present knowledge and maybe even relevant to the future. I am making two editions: 1. an Alchemist's Edition and 2. a regular (color) edition. The Alchemist's edition will have the black and white imagery and maybe the edition of dark red symbols. This being said, when I went to carve the boarder of the first page I had real trouble. Either I was physically too tired (I wear magnifying specs when I carve and the proximity of it was starting to catch up to me after a few weeks) or the wood was not going to cooperate (there were some areas of grain in the poplar that were too gapped for my delicate cuts). At any rate, I was tired of fighting but more importantly I had a deadline to reach. I had been thinking about the border anyway and my previous design of water molecules felt uncreative even though I labored over the task. I finally decided that I would do a design with an 8 pointed star with two split diamond shapes snugged into its sides to represent water molecules. I carved out a stamp and set the design into the border (I had done this too for the other design with failed results). After initial niddling, it just wasn't happening and I decided to simply carve out the border and approach the stars again from a color block aspect. I am hoping to carve the red color block for the Alchemist's edition in such a way that I have the option of printing the border in black if I wish. I'm telling myself that I will like it better this way anyway. I hope I am right!

Baren Wrapping

2008-10-26T19:41:00.000-07:00

Initially, I thought this was going to be a blog about how to avoid everything I did wrong but I don't think my first try at rewrapping my baren came out all that bad! As you can see in the image above, my baren was WAY overdue for rewrapping. The knots that were most prominent wore through the takenokawa sheath first. I really should have worked to replace the sheath sooner (it was 3 years old after all!) but laziness and procrastination took me over. At any rate, I promised myself that I could not pull the first proof for the Book of Life until I had replaced the sheath. If my reading was correct, I theorized, I could flip any damaged areas of the shin over as it should be loose inside the backing disk.
I purchased 3 replacement sheaths from our dear friends McClain's Printmaking Supply. I wanted 3 in case I screwed the first one up badly. As I carefully unfolded the shipping packaging, 3 crisp flattened takenokawa stared up at me. Now, I must say that I am a religious person but I do not attend church. When you attend church anyway, the first thing the preacher, priest, monk, or witchdoctor will tell you is that God wants you to find spirituality in the everyday. For me, printmaking can offer this up in many way. I touched the surfaces of the sheaths and was blessed by the reality that something so fragile and thin has the ability to lay under the constant pressure of elbow grease and be abraded against a block of wood for at least three years before finally wearing thin. The other epiphany for me was the size of the sheaths. We have red bamboo in our back yard and it often sheds minute sheaths that are about 3 to 4 inches long. I am supposing that the plant that shed these sheaths was very old indeed. I had a soft old piece of fabric from a ripped t-shirt that I wrapped a single sheath in after I misted it with water.

Up front, I own a Murasaki Baren and there is a universe of difference between it and the standard 7.00 baren. Think Pinto vs. Rolls Royce. I can only imagine what a Hon Baren must be like. This being said, when I (painfully) unwrapped my baren I was horrified to find that the shin was GLUED to the back of the ategawa! Someone has hobbled my baren! Well, gone were any hopes of mine to flip the shin if there was fiber damage. I'm positive there must have been fraying at some point but when I run out of traditional ategami paper I use deli wax paper and the wax must've sealed the frays shut. The crack you see in the old sheath was created when I took it off and it resisted taking any other shape other than the one it had dried and molded itself too. I HATED taking the old sheath off because the original wrapping was so elegant and graceful and I knew mine would be rude. I kept the old sheath though so that I might learn from it. I have to note that the inside of the sheath was soft and you could see where the knots in the shin made their indentions.
Preparing the takenokawa was also a very spiritual experience. I am in the basement of the art center and sometimes I got a whole day without seeing another soul. It was very quiet and I could go about my work as I please without much disturbance. I enjoy visitors but preparing a bamboo sheath is not something Charlottesvillians do everyday. To soften the sheath enough to be manipulated into shape you must use your own breath to raise its humidity and temperature. When wet, the takenokawa will curl back up into its original shape and you wrap a damp cloth with it and then blow into the root end until you have heated the entire cloth bundle with your breath. I rinsed my mouth out with water well before I started this. God knows I didn't want a peanut butter and jelly smelling baren for the next few years. So, I paced around my studio blowing into this little damp tube of cloth that looked like a giant dark blue joint. Printmaking really roots me with my heritage I feel because being brought up in the country, we're really a lot of do-it-yourself-ers and there is real value in knowing an learning a craft. If you take the easy way out in sheath softening, (with a blow dryer) you end up with a soggy sheath that will tear like a wet cracker. If you do not take the time to dampen it correctly, it will tear because it is too dry. Breathing life back into the sheath from the root end feels like shamanism because you are breathing your own breath back into it and reanimating the being so that it will work with you if you take the time and patience. Finally, after a bit of pacing and breathing, my takenokawa had come back to life!

I was amazed at how tough the thin plant was as I made my folds and it didn't crack and twisted the handle end as hard as I could and it did not fray. Alas, I did not achieve delicate folds like the master that wrapped my original Murasaki takenokawa but I had wrapped it and I had not wasted a valuable takenokawa! I was rewarded even more when I returned to the studio the next day and the baren had dried and shrunk even tighter! Now I am ready for printing the first proof for the Book of Life!

Rain Soaked Mountains

2008-10-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

I'm so close to finishing the first key block for the first page in the Book of Life I can almost taste it! I'm frustrated with my camera as a took full shots of the block and the auto focus was just not kicking in. The resulting images were just blurry. I settled for this close up. At least the new carving came out in the shot. Pretty much everything is done for this key block except the border. I remeasured the borders with calipers because I want to stay as close as possible to my original perimeters.
I decided that rather than draw teeny tiny water molecules around the border (the creep of the graphite transfer paper wouldn't catch all the detail anyway with any accuracy) I would cut out a rubber stamp and stamp the designs where I needed them. All the best laid plans, right? Yeah, number one, in an effort to quit obsessing and start doing I settled with this molecule design to begin with. Number two, the rubber will hold no more detail at the current size and I don't feel like burning out my retinas to create a smaller stamp and THEN have to do it fifty MORE times in the wood. My goal is to finish carving this coming weekend and to at least pull a proof. Since the original design felt hackneyed anyway I'm ditching it and am going to try to find something else. I know that the pattern will stay the same. What ever design I choose to make will still compact over the mountains and expand over the sun and sea in representation of water's changing states. I DID make my first attempt to change the bamboo sheath on my baren. That's another story for another day.......

Farm People

2008-10-19T19:49:00.000-07:00

I still haven't given up on the idea of festivals and mail art. One of the things I think might work for doing festivals is pedestrian type products that don't cost much and are easy to reproduce. Yay, printmaking! We are so applicable to such things! When I was a teenager, I LOVED comic books. My mom thought it was a waste of money but we didn't have life drawing in my rural area and those books really helped teach me anatomy. Anyways, fan art in popular comic zines came in the form of mail art. People would draw images on the flat side of a business envelope and write the address and postage on the seal flap. It was really neat to see what people would come up with. I began thinking that maybe customers would enjoy sending block prints like that through the post and that a series on prints on the envelopes would work well. I have a boat load of colored envelopes already and I began thinking of subject material that would be popular. Everybody loves animals and old engravings of animals are being ripped as public domain ALL the time. At first, I thought I would just do portraits of farm animals because it would work well in my conservative based market. Then, the idea of dressing the farm animals up in period clothing popped into my head. "Nah, don't do that. Just plain animals will sell better." I heard myself think. Well, screw that! I'm tired of ditching fun ideas over that. So, I went ahead with my idea for "Farm People" for my first series of mail art. I picked 10 of my favorite farm animals and will be dressing them up in 1920's attire. I'll be carving them onto blocks for a series of black ink open edition mail art envelopes. I will produce a limited edition of fine art prints as well for those who want something more archival (me included!).
My first specimen is the Work Horse. I just love his suspenders and hat! I armed myself with the Ultimate Horse book years ago and one of my favorite breeds is the Italian Heavy Draft. I like his conformation and the colors of the specimen in the book are very unique. Below is a scan of the image in the book. Not the best scan but it will do. :) Can't wait to start carving!

Billowing Clouds and Fluttering Waves

2008-10-14T19:37:00.001-07:00

The key block is one of the most exciting yet scary blocks to carve. I feel like I'm moving a bit slow on this but I want everything to be perfect and that includes the concrete decisions I have to make, AH! The motto I'm sticking with is when in doubt leave in, reduction can always happen later if it is undesirable. I've been busy carving swirling waves and billowing clouds and have thoroughly enjoyed myself! Niddling away with my small u-gouge, the texture achieved in the clouds makes them feel like burgeoning puffs of whipped cream. (Can you tell I'm a foodie?)

This shot shows the mincing pattern I used with the waves. I also used the u-gouge for this. I hope that the uniformity of line with this tool will not detract from the over all design. This block will be used in two different editions. One will feature only one other color (red symbols) and the other will be a multi-block color version of the print. I know that there will most likely not be an issue with the multicolor edition but it nags at me for the black and white version. We'll see.

On the subject of nag, this job is KILLING my back!!! Obviously, the table is too low or the chair too high. Currently, this is the best place in the studio to carve right now. I have a lower chair but then my elbows are at level with my chin and that doesn't do anybody any good. I can't complain too much. At least I have a studio. :)

Here Comes the Sun!

2008-10-05T16:32:00.001-07:00

Yay! My shining sun came out better than I thought! I was going to free hand rays coming out of the sun orb but some how my original drawing left me with a lacking feeling. I had an old hemisphere ruler laying around and decided to get all technical. I hope it prints up as well as it appears to me. The precision almost gives me the feeling of a pattern for money but I think that the clouds, rain, and mountain will balance everything out and the technicality of it will not appear cold. Originally, I was going to have little "hooks" (thumbs) attached to the ends of the rays to mimic Egyptian mythology but I think I would be the only one who would get what was going on and, in this case, that was not my goal.

I got a little happy with the camera but "fly by" shots of one's woodblock are fun and the topography of the block give the impression of a planetary surface sometimes.

I've been informed by my sister's husband (who happens to be a cabinet maker) that poplar just so happens to be one of the worst woods for warping in VA and that it will even absorb moisture out of the air on a rainy day. These things I know to be true. Once, I did a large tree print and I did not put my block away properly. I left it on the printing table with no weight. It curled into an elbow macaroni shape! Yikes! I soaked it for five minutes in a bathtub for 5 or 10 minutes and then laid a towel beneath and above it. Then I piled a stack of flat wood on top of it and left it for a week. It did return to its original shape and retains it to this day. This little story was brought about because this block is made up of two separate planks of poplar glued and hammered together with nails. Even so, one end lines up flat and the other end has one of the planks bucking up about a sixteenth of an inch. I'm hoping that I can get around that but only proofing day will tell.
Lastly, when I first carved the opening in the middle the contrast between the two planks is striking. I like to think of it as my yin and yang showing up! It should be noted that these two planks were cut from the same board. Ah, variety!

The Seedless Watermelon

2008-09-26T20:00:00.001-07:00

I'm finally finished! I'll have to get a photo of it framed because I am in LOVE with the framing I did. I'll have to buy another frame for myself. I got a black mat and a very baroque black frame and with the black ink fines and swirls it looks great!
The piece will be hung in the Meals on Wheels Benefit Show at the McGuffey Art Center. It's quite funny. The stipulation for having work in the show is to have the work focus on food. Quite a few of the pieces have a dark bent to them. Mine deals with the loss of heritage due to apathy. Another piece focuses on the gluttony of meat. LOL! Well, I guess it's appropriate that we have it during Halloween!

Big Ole' Update O' Everything!

2008-08-11T08:10:00.001-07:00

Of course, I love the design phase of printing! Drawing is at the root of my artistic abilities since I was 5 years old. That being said, I probably have a truck load of sketch books full of drawings that will never make it to an actual print. That's okay but I fear stagnation like none other! Having a looming deadline sure can horse whip you into getting a move on and not dally long on things. I know this project will take years but I want at least a few prints to show for it in July! When faced with things like this I'm a nervous wreck until I feel like I'm making significant progress. It's sort of like not being able to sleep the night before a big day. I am breathing a sigh of relief as I've finished constructing the key block for the Precipitation page. I feel at least now I'm on the road to success with block ready to carve!
I don't know if you would consider it upcycled but the wood is at least "reclaimed". I had a show in Fredricksburg VA a few years ago and I had constructed a long plank of poplar designed to be hung on the wall. The plan was to ink it up in black and then "white line" draw an image into the wood with my carving tools. The drawing itself would be sparse and in the end it was shelved in leu of better projects. I had already constructed the plank and it was a really nice piece of poplar. I knew humidity would be high and that the wood would most likely bend out of shape so I shore it up from behind with bars of poplar similar to stretchers on a canvas. It sat for a few years between sheets of protective styrofoam and then came to rest behind my sofa! Last weekend I pulled it out and we visited Mr. Miter saw and had a grand old time. My plan was to rip out the stretchers and reform them around the new planks. I did NOT remember that I had wood glued them on. I just went with it and bought two new end pieces to fit on the ends. Now, because I am employing a kento this block is far from "perfect." Mr. Miter saw didn't get everything straight but after some sanding, glue, and the end pieces things shouldn't move but so much.

In other news, I'm carving the color blocks for my Seedless Watermelon broadside. I proofed up the "sand" block in some ink I mixed up from Graphic Chemical. I was shocked at how close the color came out to what I wanted!

On the glass it almost had a greenish tinge to it. (When learning how to etch in zinc, we could curse the yellow as it would tinge to a muddy green when touching the zinc due to a chemical reaction between the metal and the ink.) As I mixed, I thought Oh well, I'll work on better ink later. This is only a proof. When it came off the press, the color was a pleasant surprise. I think my initial perceptions were an illusion from the glass and the cream paper gave it some warmth. The red of the melon is a different story.

Alizeran is the only red I have in oil based block ink (fixing that soon). It was so tacky it wouldn't pick up on the rollers. I added a hair too much easy wipe (easy to do when working with tiny quantities of ink) and the proof printed out a little splattery. At least the registration is in the ball park. Here they are lined up without the green.

I would say it was a productive studio day!

Book of Life Update

2008-08-07T19:52:00.001-07:00

Unfortunately, this image has all the charm of UFO or yeti shots. That's what you get when you try to photograph a 4H pencil drawing because it won't fit in the scanner. Anyway, I'm that much closer to beginning the carving on the first Book of Life page. Simply put, instead of the "Water Cycle" I think I'll call it precipitation. I am in love with the natural imagery itself and this picture definitely doesn't convey it but the band around it is supposed to represent H2O molecules reaction's to temperature. This reaction for the most part fuels precipitation. Close up (as long as the wood grain will allow me) I hope to be able to carve out enough detail so one will be able to count that the inner circle has 8 valence spots and that the smaller outer circles are covering 2 of those valence spots. We'll see. Here's the trouble. Having learned about the 4 major forces in the universe, it becomes a mute point to include those symbols because all four will ultimately be used in some way (weak force may be a challenge) and it becomes repedative. Convection is the ultimate drive. The two "ribbons" on either side of the sun indicate this. I'm not sure wether or not this is a successful tool though. To me, they seem to get in the way. I would welcome other opinions on this! Regardless, I must plug on. The 4 forces of the universe will definitely be addressed in their own print. There is rich inspiration there!

Labradorite

2008-08-03T16:58:00.000-07:00

I am finishing the rough workings of the Solar Cycle page in the Book of Life. This page will be particularly complicated and I am also working on a painting in gouache to help me visualize what sort of blocks I will have to carve to make it work. The Precipitation page is fairly straight forward in that there is one key block that can have colors added to it later but for rendering space I want to use a series of nearly black purples and blues instead of just black. I have a feeling I'll need to carve a key block and just deconstruct from there. I was contemplating a straight black ink version of the Book of Life anyway to mimic the old medieval alchemists texts. I snapped a shot of the center stone that the entire book has been designed around and how it will lay in relation to the book. I plan to make (most likely have made :P ) a wooden book stand with the stone resting half sunk into the middle so that the pages will appear to orbit the stone as the turn. I purchased this labradorite orb from China. Labradorite is my favorite stone. The stone itself is unremarkable and most of the time a muddy hue and flecked with dark black flecks. An impatient person would regard it as an eye sore at first glance and continue on but those who lag behind to satisfy their curiosity are in for a treat. As the object is turned and rolled in the light, a flash of blue streaked with green erupts as if the essence of the universe itself is encapsulated within this sullied shell. Contemplating the orb by night helps one to imagine what dark matter must be like. Having this mineral as the center of my book will hopefully convey the fact that wondrous beauty can lie within those often overlooked.

Wazzermelonz!

2008-07-29T19:41:00.000-07:00

Here is a proof of my finished key block for "The Seedless Watermelon" broadside. I was without my camera when I finished in the studio so alas, I lack the pristine finished block shot. I just couldn't wait to see how it looked and proofed it up anyway. There is something so satisfying in that moment between just finishing a block and inking it up for the first run. I don't think Hinduism would be such a jump for a printmaker. (At least in my process) The printmaker labors over a drawing until achieving what he/she considers perfection and then stands back and says "Ah, what a beautiful work of form and art! A lovely drawing! But you are destined for another incarnation!" And so, the printer transcribes the beloved drawing to a block and labors over the object with his/her tools until achieving what is considered perfection and stands back. "Ah, what a beautiful sculpture! A lovely relief! But you are destined for another incarnation!" And so, the printer inks up the block and proceeds to print lovely images one after another. The printer says "Ah, what beautiful children! Go and be plentiful and share yourselves among the people!" That's my romantic spin on printmaking. Catch me next week ripping my hair out over registration or crappy ink. :)
Anyways, here is a rough coloring in photoshop that I did:

I plan on printing them up on Rives BFK Cream. I have a block ink that I purchased from Graphic Chemical called Antiquarian Black. I'm hoping it will print up really richly against the cream. The above is a grayscale image but it was pulled on Masa paper in Antiquarian Black and I think the icy white dampened any warmth that was in it.

Book of Life Update

2008-07-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

I've been working lately on how to represent certain concepts with symbols and it's been hard but a fun puzzle to knock around. My previous update goes into more detail but I'm basically trying to reinvent the wheel. To complete the first page in the book which deals with water as a vehicle in as far as the precipitation cycle, there are two concepts I must illustrate. The first is universal rule of convection. This icon will be featured numerous times throughout the volume so I feel I must nail it the first time. The main player of the precipitation cycle here on earth however, is water. I needed to convey H2O without writing it in a language but at the same time use a symbol that could be recognized by any person. They typical "one large bubble connecting two small bubbles" in an "upside down mickey mouse" image feels contrived and I was hard pressed to find a different arrangement. I was also fascinated by valence shells housing electrons. Matrix numerology is beyond the average joe's comprehension (mine included at the moment) but I feel that some patterning can be intuitive. I decided to try a ring arrangement based on the atomic numbers in an element.

Valence shells have a desire to be full. Notice that the two smaller (hydrogen) atoms add an electron each to complete the 8 electron spaces necessary to have a stable valence shell (oxygen only has 6 to go around in it's L valence). Still, the arrangement irked me and I wanted to try another arrangement feeling that I could put the electron holes wherever I chose.

At this point, I wore myself out and I would like to have more time to play around with this idea but as it stands time is of the essence (due in July 2009). I decided to try out different color arrangements just for play:

The Seedless Watermelon

2008-07-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

The McGuffey Art Center has agreed to have a show in October for the benefit of Meals On Wheels. Meals On Wheels is an organization that drives meals around town to shut-ins who would otherwise not be able to cook for themselves at home. A percentage (I can't remember how much!) of sales for that show will go to Meals On Wheels. I'd imagine that those people could use that scratch right about now seeing as their drivers are voluntary and they DON'T get reimbursed for the cost of gas. We've all agreed to make pieces of art with the theme of food. I could do a still life of fruit or what have you but I like to stir things up. I have really been thinking lately about how we are running the planet into the ground and how the presumed answer to hunger around the world and in countries with low-arable land is GM crops. Well, there is a lack of arable land because we have not taken care of our soils and that needs attention first. The only thing you'll get out of GM crops on low-arable land is the need in a few years for new GM crops to thrive in non-arable land. Also, I have been reading books on seed saving and the recommendations are to grow plants that are open pollinated or heirloom. To my amazement when I went through my regular seed catalogs, 90% of the seeds sold were hybrids. This means if one were to save seed from the hybrid (if it were viable), the next generation would not be "true" to the first. It would revert to a lesser crop or not produce at all. Then I stumbled onto "Seedless Watermelons" seed. Everyone loves seedless watermelon. I love seedless watermelon but as a future seed saver, the fruit would be useless to me. It struck me that if something horrible happened tomorrow to our infrastructure, the majority of the populous would be too ignorant to feed itself for very long. They would die or kill each other for the remaining food. Our ancestors traversed the deserts in Egypt with watermelons to quench their thirst. The thick empty rinds were even sometimes filled with water. Were the fruits cursed for the tedious habit of having seeds? Doubtful. I feel more and more isolated from my generation as I see more and more people fall under the slumber of convenience and ignorance. So, far be it from me to treat anyone to a simple unbiased still life of fruit. I am working on a broadside of seedless watermelons resting in the sand. I've already set the passage in 12pt. Tudor Black. I don't have a very extensive set and pretty much only have 3 e's left after setting it all up. The photoshopped version features a different font.
On a lighter note, my mystery veggie is finally having babies! A few of these vines popped up uninvited when I planted flowers and dill. I recognized the leaves and let them hang out. For the longest time the little yellow buds blossomed, got fertilized, and then dropped off before fruition but now they appear to have taken hold. I wonder what my little fuzzles will be?

Some observations of my own...

2008-07-06T10:16:00.000-07:00

The last post appears rather backwards in the cue at the moment. I started working on it while the ideas were fresh in my head and saved it as a draft. Consequently, it posted as the day I started the draft and not the day I finished it. Oh well, anyway, just a little personal information that some of you may rather not know but I'm hoping that this may inspire others or that maybe someone else can relate to my situation and use it as a tool.
I'm currently wrestling with some concepts for my book of life and one of them is the concept of Solar Maximum and Solar Minimum. The sun goes through a cycle that follows an 11 year track. Over the course of 11 years, the sun goes from fairly "stable" in it's energy output to violently explosive with solar flares and sun spots popping up all over it's surface. See my previous post entitled Book of Life Update for a more in depth discussion. Ultimately, the cause for the violent sunspots is the fact that the equator of the sun rotates faster than the poles and the magnetic fields covering the surface of the sun get warped and torqued and finally snap into a tangle of outbursts.
I have always been heavy since my sister and I were little and we looked like the number 10! I lost 30lbs. when I was 20 by jogging and basically not eating. Fast forward to today....8 years later and I have gained back and more. It didn't bother me because I am tall and wore it well in my opinion. I "didn't have time to jog" after I took a job as a medical center receptionist to pay the student loans and even though I enjoyed working in restaurants, I HATED working at the medical center. Anything and everything people said to me pissed me off. Then one day it happened. I was sitting at the desk taking crap from a patient and the room suddenly got flushed with heat. My face turned red and I started to sweat and my heart began to beat as if I was doing my jogging routine. A quick medical examination revealed that I had run away blood pressure. That was about a year ago and I have recently gotten back into my jogging. I've lost 15 pounds that way and my blood pressure has leveled with the help of medicine that I can't wait to be off of.
The point is, in my situation, I have adopted the 11 year sun cycle as an example to learn by. If I'm in a situation I hate and I don't look after myself, my body will wind itself up and look for a way to deal with my inactivity and extra stress much like the sun does during solar max. Everything bursts out everywhere in a seething explosion. Jogging wears me out and counters stress so that nothing much gets to me much like the tranquility experienced during solar minimum. Unlike the sun, I am shrinking the more I jog :) !
How does this relate to printmaking? Let it always be practiced that on your travels during a project, you should always keep your eyes open for lesson to learn and that nature is always an open book to those who choose to read it.

Berry Helper

2008-06-22T18:29:00.000-07:00

I found this little guy while gathering berries in the morning and let him hitch a ride. Snails don't gross me out as much as slugs do. Slugs are just straight up GROSS! Anyways, I am going to have a Book of Life update soon but I'd like to throw the botanical drawings up on the net first. I've noticed the milkweed and chickory blooming here and have added them to my growing list of local floras to cover on my mail art venture. I'm almost finished (sounds better than "getting sick of") designing patterns with blackberries. Here are two of the better ones I like:

A cane of thorns twines in an infinite loop as berries sprout and flourish the arrangement

I hope, when this finally makes it to print, that this will be reminiscent of old botanical woodblock prints used in herbalist manuscripts.

Book of Life Update

2008-06-19T19:24:00.000-07:00

I REALLY enjoy working on this project. I thought I'd get that in writing for when I start printing and tearing my hair out going I hate this project! First things first, I love these images! Here is the website they are from so that you can read the material that I have read: http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/coronalweather/MagFields/page3.html
Thanks Berkeley!
I've completed the rough sketch for the Precipitation Cycle and am now trying to refine that with a set of symbols (*) I would like to include in the images to help unravel the puzzle for confused viewers. I have also decided to have a border of pattern around each page of the book. Not only will this give me an opportunity to include more symbolics but also a clean delineation REALLY helps registration line up. Herein lies the problem, though. I'm finding that I'm basically trying to reinvent the wheel. For example, with the Precipitation Cycle, water is the vehicle being driven and the driver is temperature. I wanted to make a geometric pattern out of a symbol for water around the boarder that wouldn't immediately be recognized as symbol by a pedestrian but easily discernible by a scientist. The simple large bubble flanked by two small bubbles seems contrived to me (I'm considering maybe this will be my answer anyway as rings instead of bubbles) but the hexagonal chains rendered in most molecular structures I have found are made more to convey carbon than any other molecular structure. Brains melting yet? For the most part, I want to push the normal scientific language for the elements into something beautiful and ancient like the temples and tomes of old. I was hoping to play around with the concept of valence shells but that development will take a little more time.
My latest challenge and puzzle has been the 11 (22) Year Solar Cycle. As nature has proven to me time and time again, in essence this cycle follows a pattern but in practice it has many variables. In the research I've done so far (and been able to understand), texts say that the sun goes through an 11 year cycle of solar maximum to solar minimum. This refers to the amount of activity erupting on the surface. At maximum, the sun belches massive amounts of material into the solar system and it's surface is violently blistered with magnetic and x-ray explosions. At solar minimum, the amount of sunspot storms is reduced to a few if any. Also, during the cycle the sun will switch its polarity of the magnetic poles. What has NOT been explained is how both of these occurrances relate to each other. Do these storms occur during the magnetic switch or when the poles have established themselves? I have not been able to find the answer in any of the texts available to me or any online sources. Instead of shelving the image and waiting, I have made an executive decision: I will render the image as logic speaks to me. If my deduction is incorrect, it will be the most beautiful failure you've ever seen. I have read that in the process of changing poles, sometimes the sun will even have two north or south poles before everything works itself out. I have also read that sun spots are explosions of material that follow the path of wayward magnetic fields. This happens because the center of the sun rotates faster that the top halves. Rotation twists and stretches the normal mesh of magnetic bands out of proportion and instead of infinitely winding around the sun, break and pop into strange loopy tables. Here's what I think: When the sun settles into an established magnetic pole phase, the maximum cycle fires up because there is now an established magnetic pathway to follow and be twisted out of proportion and create maximum storms. We'll see if I'm right.
(*) Anyways, I've known that I wanted to include some tools used by the ancients (Egyptians, Asians, and South Americans) that would help me use text without using text. Cartouches were used to set aside and delineate concepts. Going down my meager list of cycles, I realize that even these can be steeped down to a common thread. It would be asinine not to address this. I've noticed Convection, Gravity, and Chemical Reactions are usually the root of most cycles. If anyone is willing to correct me or give me more examples, I'm all ears. Also, my list of 10 is becoming compressed. I was going to address the CO2 cycle in deciduous forests and also address respiration in two different illustrations but I've found that a richer illustration would include the two. This only leaves yet more room for more cycles. My brain feels like a mad scientists lab as it steeps these concepts down and mulls them around while searching for new material. Mwuhaa-haa-ha-haa-haaaaaaaaa!

Under the Archeopteris Tree

2008-06-12T19:35:00.000-07:00

I scanned my mostly finished Archeopteris drawing in sections and it's taking me a while to fit the pieces together smoothly. The only details missing are the spore images in each corner (That's going to take a little magic!) and the rotting vegetation in the swamp. Here two placoderms try to maneuver around the fallen branches in the brackish water to nab the 8 toed Acanthostega. The nimble fan-tailed Acanthostega are happy to disappear into their twisted branch haven and leave the placoderms to their tangled mess.
I was driving to work the other day and, for reasons unknown to me, a large turtle was trying to cross the road. Now, in Nelson County the only real definition for "large turtle" equals snapping turtle and normally they should not be tusselled with. I turned around and pulled over to help dummy across the road. He probably smelled a female on the other side or she probably wanted to lay eggs on the other side. I don't know. Anyways, when I got to him (I'm just guessing on sex) I couldn't tell if I was too late. He was flattened out and "leaking fluid". Sometimes turtles do this and pee when they get scared. I took my shoe and shifted his shell and that didn't go over well. CLACK CLACK!!! The sound of hollow bone resounded as he tried to snap at me. He quickly inflated and turned to face me with a hiss as a large semi filled with turkeys came down the road. My family had a general store growing up and the butcher taught us kids how to pick up snapping turtles. You get them to clamp down on a broom handle or stick and then pick him up by the tail. I've found as long as you hold them out at length, grabbing by the tail will suffice. Well, as the semi and a few cars is swiftly approaching, dummy turtle turns to face me so I can't grab his tail. I just looked at him and he looked at me. I was dressed for my day job and now I was late and the prospect of getting hit in traffic or turtle jaws snapping off my fingers was becoming less attractive. Judging by his size (he was about the size of a large basketball) he seemed to have made it okay this far. "Well, Jack, you're on your own." I said and bid him adew. Funny thing is, as I was leaving a young gentleman had pulled over to do the same thing! By looking at him....I don't think he knew the tail only rule....
Anyways, there was no flattened turtle in the road so somehow Jack made his way across.
The point of this story is a little moment in history. As I was drawing the placoderms, I couldn't help but notice the similarities in facial structure between them and a turtle. I read that the bony plates on it's mouth were self sharpening and sure enough the lower jaw had perfectly angled grooves for the upper fang-like protrusions to slide into. The sound of Jack snapping a warning at me MUST have sounded very similar to the placoderms thrashing about. Just another illustration that as everything is different, we are all in reality the same.

First of the Season

2008-06-08T16:46:00.000-07:00

Here are the first Black Raspberries of the season. They are SO yummy! I like to get all I can and then make pie or tarts. My wild berries are starting to produce several babies around the original patch. I think I'll dig them up and start cultivating them on the perimeter of my garden. The thorny bushes get thick and the deer normally don't seem to like to cross through them. Besides, the ready berry food source should satisfy them enough on their side anyways. That will not deter the rabbits, though :(
On the printmaking side of things, my Archeopteris picture is almost complete! I need to draw my little Acanthostegas and the bodies of the hovering Placoderms but other than that it'll be carving time soon!
I was hoping to have photos to post of my print run today but the run was cut short....by me. A few years ago, I invested a lot of money in a LOT of Edgeworthia paper. I thought I was going to need a good bit of the paper and it just didn't turn out that way. I have yet to produce a viable edition of one of my carved forestscape blocks. This block is two or three times the length of the smaller "Sage Forestscape" block. I went to print on the edgeworthia paper and the fibers wicked so badly on the first two that I didn't think it was worth it to continue. In conclusion, if it's not broke don't fix it. I did a print run (The Laughing Kirin) with the edgeworthia with great success because the block image had more finite detail. I did a print run (Sage Forestscape) with hahnamugle paper with great success with a block image that had a few solid shapes. I have some hahnamugle that I'll break out next weekend. For the record, I personally am now not a huge fan of edgeworthia paper.

More design work...

2008-06-04T13:02:00.000-07:00

For at least the next month or so, design work is all I'll be doing. I'm toying with the idea of having the pages for the "Book of Life" be either watercolor paintings first or at least monoprints (hand colored key block prints)for the show next July because I'm not sure that I will be able to procure what I need for a large number of multiple block prints. I am going to try and use reclaimed wood where I can to be more "green" but prospects have proven slim so far.
AT THE SAME TIME, I've been designing items for sale at festivals and such to finance the show. I love the art nouveau period and works by William Morris. Nelson county has so many beautiful indigenous flora and fauna that they will be the inspiration for this next line. Species include blackberries, passion fruit, tulip poplar. Though it is not indigenous, my bleeding heart is still in bloom and I was inspired to start with these designs. I can't wait to start playing with colors!

The Archeopteris Tree

2008-05-29T13:25:00.000-07:00

My scanner pretty much mangled this scan but then I don't usually have much success scanning in sketches. This is a detail of a print I'm working on for next summer's show. I had the idea a few years ago and never really saw it to fruition. The Archeopteris Tree was a very prolific progymnosperm (before seeds bearing plants)and one of the very first trees. It grew in a large swampy area near the steppes of the Blue Ridge Mountain Range back when they were the size of the Himilayas of today. Archeopteris had the habit of shedding leaves and limbs on its growth cycle up and out. Placoderms or plated fish ruled the seas at the time and had voracious appetites. An organism was discovered from this period that was still fish like but instead of fins had four limbs with 8 fingers attatched to the ends. The joints were too weak to support the weight of the animal but would be perfect for brushing aside vegetation and wriggling through brackish water. I can't remember the name of said animal off the top of my head but the theory goes that "8-toes" sought the refuge of Archeopteris swamps in hopes of escaping the Placoderms. Perhaps this environment harbored and encouraged the first steps towards land dwelling vertibrates. I am drawing up plans to print a large scale woodblock print in the style of old European block print texts with the image of a great Archeopteris standing in brackish water. Amidst the shed limbs of vegetation, a few "8-toes" hang out under the trunk of the tree while Placoderms patrol the outlaying areas. To help the "old world" feel of the image, I'm drawing a boarder of Archeopteris leaves and 4 corner images of Archeopteris spore. Now if I only knew what Archeopteris spore looked like.....

Ghetto Studio

2008-05-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

Yessir, that thar is baling twine holding ma speakers onto a zinc plate shipping crate. I ain't say'n it's purty but it works. I moved a ton of stuff around in my studio and even though I had to sacrifice the space my speakers originally resided at, it turned into a really nice set up. I'll be excited to see how much better my set up is now. I am in the process of revamping my old DistinctMink Etsy site. I was REALLY sold on the idea of ditching it and consolidating everything on PistolesPress.Etsy.com but I just don't think that would be a good idea. When I go to markets and fairs, I'm not going to drag my expensive works with me so why lump them together in Etsy? Also, the packaging for DistinctMink and PistolesPress products will be different. I can happily use biodegradable packaging for stationery and journals but I can't for the fine art works as that stuff is not yet archival. Maybe one day.

2008-05-24T18:35:00.000-07:00

Well, production is definitely underway! The hard bound books are proving to be WAY more time consuming than anticipated. The covering of the book boards and installing ribbons is the time consuming part. I can zip through binding them pretty well. The best news is that the 100% biodegradable packaging is working out! Yay! I love guilt free packaging! I've noticed more and more companies are using starch packing peanuts as opposed to the styrofoam ones. Thank god! It's about time! The best part is yet to come. I have purchased some Lindt Chocolate for my photoshoot to post on Etsy soon and somebodies going to have to eat all that chocolatey goodness!

Alternate Realities

2008-05-13T15:51:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I'm posting this on the net. This is one of four cursory proofs I pulled of the Alternate Realities blocks. It kind of makes me throw up a little bit. I mean, that's the purpose of proofing; to see where you are and where you need/want to be. For the most part, the registration isn't THAT off but it's irksome to me. It's especially irksome because I completed carving 8 kentos in a few days and now five of them need tweaking. There were bokashi and other things I left out because I just wanted to see how things lined up. I think, if I remember correctly, I carved the gas tanks first and pulled proofs that way. From there, I traced the other images one by one from the original drawing and there is where my problems lie. My original kentos were virtually nonexistent and if my drawing wasn't spot on, this is what I end up with. Lesson learned. The ink mixing was another pain. I love spring greens: celery green, grass green, parrot green, mint green, seafoam green. You see where I am going with this. The greens I have mixed from cadmium yellow and cobalt or prussian blue look like vomit. I just don't like them. The orange created with cadmium red and cadmium yellow for the solar panel key block matches too closely to the middle sienna color block of the geothermal image. They are close to the same in my eye.
I don't want to toss these because I've kept them for so long and also I've put a good deal of time into them. I think I might ditch the idea of color blocks to save hair pulling and do something I've always wanted the time to play with: Chine Colle!

Design Stages....

2008-05-12T20:04:00.000-07:00

The Book of Life continues to develop in its design stages and other works are in the pipe. To raise funds for the creation of The Book of Life, I have unearthed and am revamping printing blocks that never came to fruition. Baren Forum had an exchange years ago that had the theme of Surimono. I regrettably had to drop out because of an imbalance. The discrepancy was that my carving skills developed faster than my printing ability. I carved several blocks but printing them proved disastrous. In frustration, I had to drop out of the exchange and abandon the blocks to the far corner of my studio. It's probably been four years since then and I pulled them all out this past sunday. I saw right away that my early concept of the kento was flawed. I re-carved 6 kentos on sunday and I have 2 more to do tomorrow and then can hopefully pull a proof to see where I am at. At any rate, the title of the piece was going to be Alternate Realities. One side of the diptych image had a black row of gasoline pumps and the other side had a similar silhouette but instead was in brilliant color. The colored shapes were those of the various alternate energy resources that are available and should be employed further. These include hydro turbines, wind turbines, geothermal pumps, and solar cells. I hope to have some nice results tomorrow.
About the picture, I would like to work fairs and festivals in the summer and perhaps put these letterpresses to work on jobs they were meant for. I have another Etsy store called DistinctMink that has been stale for quite some time and I was contemplating destroying it were it not for a nice lady who bought some of my stationery and encouraged me to keep producing. I want to create a correspondence set that features flora native to Nelson County. I set out with my digital camera as we've had some lovely roadside burgeoning on my driveway. This photo is of a Tulip Poplar blossom. Normally, they would be blooming high in the air but a specimen rooted in a spring was nice enough to sweep her boughs low so I could see them. We also have plenty Blackberry, Choke Cherry, and Wild Rose blossoming as well. Smells nice at my house!
Chocolate Book Update: Hands down! The soft cover chocolate books are so much easier to print and bind. I have completed 10 of those already and am STILL working on the design stages of the hard bound. I bound one this afternoon and I can't stand the ribbon I put on it so I'll have to perform minor surgery tomorrow, ugh. I ordered packaging materials this morning for them so hopefully they'll be on Etsy soon. Impact Images, my packaging supplier of choice (www.clearbags.com) has biodegradable bags I can put them in!!!! Yay!!!! I still have to use the old plastics for prints though as the degradable bags are not acid free :( Progress will catch up with that I'm sure :)

CONTEST: The Book of Life

2008-04-29T07:21:00.000-07:00

There are bits of knowledge that man has carried with him since the beginning of his existence about the natural world but only recently has he begun to realize how truly interlaced and connected these categorized concepts are. Our world is a giant scale that has balanced and continues to balance itself in a universe of seeming chaos. Natural disasters are simply a balancing of the scale and humans are a testament to the tenacity of life but now that we are able effect the natural systems in place, directly or indirectly, we must acknowledge how interconnected and delicate they are. People must find a way to sync up with the our cradle of life or step aside for nature's next improvement.

I conceived this idea in 2007 but only now have had the opportunity to flesh it out and get started. My knowledge of the Earth's interconnected cycles are limited at best because I am not a trained scientist but even the ancient Hindi's and Buddhists knew that somehow everything is connected. As a block printer and bookmaker, my goal is to create a tome of images that infer the natural systems of the earth. I am trying to abstain from including any script as the book must be able to be read and understood by any culture. This being said, I will be employing things like molecular structures and other such visual clues in places like borders. I am also open to including cultural symbolism as well. An example can be seen in the illustration above. The barbs on the ends of the sun's rays are actually hands. The ancient Egyptians used a stylized version of a thumb and flat palmed hand to infer how the sun god touched and blessed his people with his rays of light.
The contest is to see how many of these natural systems I can illustrate, carve into blocks, print, and cram into one volume. When I say I want to create a tome, I want this thing to be big! Your challenge is to present me a natural system in the earth that I have not thought of yet. If I use it, you will receive a print of your system from the edition when it is completed. Now, I said natural system in the earth but many things affect these. For example, I am including the Eleven Year Solar Cycle because the Monder Minimum will attest to that and everyone acknowledges the Lunar Tides. I am also not opposed to the concept of Cosmic Wind Cloud Seeding but I need to be a little bit more educated about that. Here is the list of cycles I have already conceived ideas for so that you'll know what not to suggest. Maybe you have something to add to these concepts? Let me know as that may affect my imagery and you may get a japanese woodblock print!

1. H2O in convection= the weather: liquid, evaporation, condensation, precipitation, liquid

2. H2O and Salt in convection= oceanic currents: warm saline rises, cold saline sinks (the filling of voids in this movement creates the currents)

3. Nitrogen/Carvon Cycle: vegetation utilizes ground nutrients, herbivore consumes vegetation, carnivore consumes herbivore, vermiculture consumes carnivore, vermiculture creates ground nutrients through castings.

4. Solar Cycles (11 years): solar activity cycle and polar magnetic switch

5. Tectonics: magma rises to mantle to create new crust, crust sinks to mantle to create new magma

6. Terran Convection: lava currents through convection

7. Lunar Cycles: lunar gravity on currents

8. CO2 Cycle: leaves absorb CO2 in summer and outgas in winter

9. Respiration: plants absorb CO2 and outgas O2, animals absorb O2 and outgas CO2

The illustrations will be just like the image you see above. Everything must move in a circle (cycle). The pages will literally be round and the book will look like a half circle when closed. There will be a circle cut out of the center as I have already designed a concept for a book stand. I have purchased a sphere of Labradorite from China to be mounted in the center so the pages will glide over it as they turn.
This book is a huge undertaking and I therefore I have not placed a deadline upon it. I am due to have a show about this concept in July of 2009 and hope to finish many prints by then for the show but I do not think that the book will be finished as a whole then. In fact, I think there will be several editions of this book as it grows. Life is a journey not a race and so I anticipate working on this project for 5 to 10 years, maybe even more.
Good luck! I look forward to hearing your response!

So Close!

2008-04-28T07:52:00.001-07:00

No pun intended but I'm so close I can taste it! I received the deep cocoa colored paper in the mail a few days ago and went straight away to cutting it up into book covers for the hard bound books and jackets for the soft cover books. (Yes, I'm crazy and am printing and binding both!) I carved the cover plate design out of linoleum instead of wood and printed that a week ago. I put my info in lead type and an awesome pilot press decal I got from David Churchman. Those I will attach to the inside of the back cover as a sort of hack collophon. Yesterday, I printed the title pages and end pages. Because I carved the block to perform for both the hard bound books and the soft bound, it was like a three ring circus trying to keep track which orientation was which. It also did not help that I carved the image on the WRONG SIDE of the block!!!! No biggie, I just had some overhang I had to protect against grimy quoins and furniture but an annoyance at myself for a stupid move no less. I'm doing a little tap dance to the print gods in front of my drying rack right now to hasten the drying. Yes, print god tap dances appease the forces that be into pity for an idiot. I snapped a photo of the title block and flipped it in photoshop.

Maru Bake Illness!

2008-04-27T08:03:00.000-07:00

I tried to post this to Baren Forum but I've been having some email issues lately with things not getting delivered so I'm throwing this debate open to everyone! I purchased my favorite Maru Bake from Baren Mall and have used it with great success for the past three or four years. I understand that it's only been about five years since my introduction to the Moku Hanga and that my brush has seen me through my learning stages (still learning btw!). The last time I broke the brush out to print my Strawberry Roan edition, I noticed this split in the wood!

I noticed a few months back that the back of the brush was developing a saddle shape slowly but surely so I'm not entirely surprised but I'm wondering if maybe I'm doing something wrong in the care of these brushes or is the life span of 4 to 5 years a good life considering the work they do. One clue I'm guessing is that maybe the hole I drilled for a hanging eyelet (my brushes are hung in the air for good circulation as they dry and are stored there when not in use) held excess fluid during use and cause rot? When printing, after I've soaked the brush a good 10 to 15 minutes (the bristles are suspended in water and the handle usually just bobs), I rest it bristles down on a blotter which inevitably gets damp. This is it's home until I pick it up for printing or wash it out and store it. Also, it has been damp here lately with spring so the humidity could very well be a factor.

Here are a few other images of the back and side of the brush. Maybe you can tell that the back is starting to warp into a saddle shape.

At any rate, I'm going to be working larger for a show I'm scheduled to have next summer in July of 2009 and I'm going to be ordering more Maru Bake anyway. I was just wondering if anyone had any suggestions for me about prevention or if this is typical.

In other news, for those of you going "Where the hell is this contest she's been making noise about?!?!" Chill. I'm putting the finishing touchs on the sample image. I had to make a whole other one as the original image was too light to photograph and too big to scan! Keep checking! It's coming soon! Also, I'm almost ready to start binding the chocolate books! Yay!

The Strawberry Roan!

2008-04-19T20:33:00.000-07:00

The Strawberry Roan has arrived! I am surprised at how well this print run has turned out. This is my first attempt at multiple color blocks and registration on top of a gradation. I had an image in my head of how the colors would turn out and which ones I would choose. Though I chose accordingly, like always, the image in one's mind is always different from the outcome. I actually like the product better! The kirin block project began as a spin off from another project. I was invited to participate in a beastiary making project and had come up with several sketches of different fantastic animals before ultimately deciding on my signet, Harvey. My kirin image was not truly new. I had designed a kirin for a book I was working on called "Murphy's Wife" and the animal struck me as a very entertaining subject. The traditional chinese kirin is usually rendered as being covered in scales with a mane of flames. I wanted to work on trying to design an animal that would in theory be able to exist. To balance out the body of a horse visually, I blended the bone structure of a horse skull and dragon head. Noting how the pelts in the equine world are extremely diverse, I softened the look of koi scales into a dapple effect.
I could have kicked myself when I started printing as I forgot my camera when I printed the salmon colored skin block, the green mane and tail block. Doh! After that, I was tired and went home with the intention of coming back the next day. Well, I didn't make it back and in total, the kozo was damp for two and a half days before I returned to it! I printed the cadmium hooves and horn and then made the executive decision to dry the prints and let them rest. The paper was beginning to shed fibers and I was afraid that the cadmium was going to offset as I stacked them back in the humidor. It turned out to be the right choice. I dampened them again after 3 days and set about making magic!

The colors really complimented each other well and seeing the gradation wick into the paper was real eye candy!

Lastly, I pulled the key block in a plum color.

I like this image of the initial key block print in sumi and the finished color print. The title for this edition struck me when I pulled the first scale pattern gradation off. The color and arrangement reminded me so much of strawberry seeds and there does exist a coloration in horses called "strawberry roan." What better way to celebrate spring?

Chocolate Pages

2008-03-24T09:30:00.000-07:00

I printed page images on one side of paper last week and now, this past saturday, I printed the same thing on the other side of the pages. When they are folded and trimmed into signatures for binding, they will read like a journal. I have to carve one more block with a title page and an ending image to finish off the text block. It will be tricky printing those as printing them for hard bound books as well as pamphlet stitch books will be two different processes. I've gotten this far so I guess I'm up for the challenge. After all that, I will carve an image plate for the front of the book and whip those out on my C&P Pilot on some pink paper. I've already sanded the book covers for 10 books so I'm really excited to see what my end result will finally look like. I know I still have a lot of work ahead of me but starting is always the hardest!
In other news, I got a show at the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville VA on July 2009 so consider yourselves warned! More on that later as I'm am bursting at the seams to tell you that it will be an interactive process on this blog. The resulting works will hopefully reflect the feedback I get throughout my posts and there will even be a constest!
I'm still jogging every day to every other day and am looking forward to reaping the benefits. This is the beginning of week three! I wished I had my camera as yesterday my husband and I caught a dog fight as we were coming back from our jog. We were on our way up the driveway when a murder of crows began cackling and jeering. We looked up to see a red tailed hawk being chased by the crows over our heads. Once they got past our fence line, most of the crows doubled back to our property but two were still in hot persuit. It was entertaining to watch as the hawk clearly had the advantage of tight manuevering in the sky. The crows dove and scratched but always missed. I think he was toying with them. I'm sure exchanges like this will become more common as recently our rabbits have been popping up and the crows do not want to share their territory. We had so many rabbits last year that there were 5 hawks in the tree near our house. So much for my garden......

Sailing Along

2008-03-20T13:48:00.000-07:00

Well, here it is! Bill Boys printed up this lovely edition of prints from my block and I had a really good time with this project!

Chocolate Books

2008-03-19T12:46:00.000-07:00

We're in action! My plan is to try and teach classes at McGuffey during the Fall and Winter and then to do Festivals and Art Fairs during the Spring and Summer. Before this can even be attempted, one needs products to market. There is a market for fine art and such at these things but it's mostly a pedestrian market where people will more openly part with a bit of cash for a nick-nack. I figure that my letterhead and bound books would fit nicely here. Here is the beginnings of my attempts with the I Love Chocolate Journal. I carved this block of poplar after finding that linoleum didn't offer me the precision I wanted. The design really pushed the limitations of poplar as some of the hand carved letters are as big as the fibers of wood themselves. In the long run, the poplar was a hair more detailed than the linoleum but this is lost when accounting for the fact that the grain prints up. Cherry or Maple you say? Maybe so but Poplar was faster to carve through and easy to get and as far as I know, sustainable to this area. It's an experiment and not altogether unsuccessful. The prints definately have a rustic feel to them. My Vandy is a manual hand roll press and thus there are variations but I am slowly but surely beginning to like variation. I will never, however, call outright mistakes and blunders a "beautiful variant." That's just sacrificing quality. Anyways, after tweaking out some trouble spots, I finally got a good print run going and now I'm eager to carve and print up a title plate! I can't wait to see how it turns out. Even the ink looks like chocolate!

2008-03-14T09:27:00.000-07:00

I think now it's time for a change. I originally reserved this blog for fine art and current work posting. There is supposed to be no content featuring my private life/opinions but I've found that those are the arteries to my working process and often the roots of inspiation for me so it's not going to be strictly about work now but you'll see that everything leads there eventually.
So my husband and I have recently gotten back into making beer. He possessed the knowledge to begin with but I naturally enjoy helping because I'm the one who wants a garden and chickens. This is a photo of our brew at the beginning when you must simmer the grains in a muslin sock at a moderated temperature. For those of you who are thinking about learning, go to NorthernBrewer.com. They are the best! Anyways, there is a piece of my heritage in this photo. When we pulled everything out to start brewing (it was kept scrunched up in the corner of a cabinet....bad....bad...bad), we found that his thermometer was broken at the end. Yikes! I love antiques and have a small collection of things my ancestors have used down the generations (I've got my great uncle's cattle cane with notches carved in it to represent hash marks for heads.) including my great grandmother's candy thermometer. I don't know how Mawmaw would feel about her candy thermometer making beer but it sure did work! Pat bottled the beer yesterday night and we have to wait 3 weeks to see how it will turn out. I hope it'll be good!
Perhaps I will post later as I received some copies of Bill Boys "Small World" entry that I carved the blocks for. They look great in color and I was glad to participate in a collaborative effort! (Hint, Hint for those of you who would like to collaborate on a piece with me!)

Rough Seas

2008-02-04T19:26:00.000-08:00

This is the key block image for a four color set I did with fellow NAPA member Bill Boys. I hope he enjoys them! I sent them out in the mail today. NAPA stands for National Amatuer Press Association and I get a mailing once a month of flyers and chapbooks that people have composed for distribution. One of these days, yours truly will find the time to make some too!

Pink Peacock

2008-01-28T06:19:00.001-08:00

Yep, admittedly, it's been forever since my last post. Here's a sample of an endevour I took recently. I thought it would be interesting to make digital stock to sell on etsy and see how fast I could save up some money to pay on some of my student loans. Haven't sold the first one yet. After slaving in photoshop a couple of nights straight after my other job, it didn't seem like something I would enjoy anyway. Did come up with some nice imagery though! :) Perhaps they will come in handy some other time.
I will hopefully have some more neato imagery to lay out here soon! My absence has not been slothful! I have plenty (too much) to fill the void with in the studio these days. On a personal note, this is the first winter that seems to be affecting me. It's also the first winter I've known about and am treating hypertension. I think this may be why I'm so tired all the time. Being jacked up on high blood pressure makes you feel like superwoman until it starts pushing your brain matter out through your ears. I've been trying different medications to treat it but they all make me sleep alot! So, by the time I come home and it's time to blog, I've probably passed out already. Well, I don't anticipate having this problem after this summer so, viva la health!! Soldier on peoples!

Kirin's Clothes

2007-12-11T07:39:00.001-08:00

Here are the different color blocks for the final Kirin print. I had to sharpen my knives halfway into them. It was a long time in coming anyways. I hope and pray to god that I carved the kentos accurately. I've learned to give my brush a wide birth in cutting out room around the printed area because I can get a little spread out at times. I think I might want to carve one more block for adding luminescent dots in the middle of the scales if I can find an interference dusting powder to suit my tastes!

Chinese Brass Bell

2007-12-11T07:36:00.000-08:00

I was pricing goodies for my open house the other day at World Market and fell in love with this little bauble! I've got it hanging above my door in the studio and sometimes I can come in a jingle it. It's a very cheerful ornament and I can't help but smile when I see it!

I've got my work cut out for me.

2007-12-02T05:27:00.000-08:00

I can really be the queen of clutter. Stacks of paper seem to be my real problem but as a printmaker that's just habit. I snapped this photo of my studio in the morning because the light was so pretty but the studio is a little cluttered. I've got to clean up and have everything pristine for my open house this saturday!! I've been too busy to price picture frame rail for the place but I think that would make a world of difference. I could jam random nails into the brick and cinderblock like my my previous occupants had or I could line the ceiling with frame rail and simply move things whenever I wanted. It's one thing to spackle and paint drywall but I'm not about to try that with brick.
I spent my day yesterday sharpening all my knives and I think I ground my fingers off but most of my knives are razor sharp now. I still have a couple U-gouges to finish off today but my Kirin blocks are ready to carve and then comes the hard part of deciding which paper to use!

A Kirin in progress

2007-11-28T07:16:00.000-08:00

How much wood can a block carver chuck if a block carver chucks wood all night?
I just love my little laughing Kirin! He makes me smile! I decided to pull a series of prints in black from the key block even though I'm still carving color blocks. I really enjoy the graphic quality of his lines and love his little tongue sticking out from his mustache. I may start a series of Kirins, who knows.
Here is an image of the key block and the scale block together. I enjoyed the sketch of Kirin's body so much that I didn't want to overlap it with real scales so I carved a scale block to go over his contours much in the way a dappled horse would look. The scales are meant to mimic a pattern of coat markings instead of the actual thing. I just pulled prints for 3 more blocks including his mane and tail, his horn and hooves, and a gradation block for his body. A fellow carver, Josef Beery, saw what I was doing and asked if I was going to mix metallic pigment in for the scales and I groaned because now I want to carve another block of dappling in the middle of each scale to dust with a metallic, agh! We'll see if it happens. Anyways, I was thinking of a wine and chartruese colouring for my kirin. What does anyone else think?

Into the white forest....

2007-11-25T07:19:00.000-08:00

Yet again, I have neglected my blogging duties but at least it is evident that I was not wasting my time. Here is my most recent tree book, Blue Tome. I originally made this piece with dried ferns and dogwood twigs in the cavity. Somehow, when I dabble with found objects and assemblages of that nature it feels contrived and I can't quite get the results I'm looking for. After the show I had when I initially made the piece, I closed it up and it sat in the corner of my room waiting for me to be inspired to fix it. I finally pulled it out and went to work! There are three levels of cut paper and the bottom level was the most detailed. I was beginning to think I would never finish! The work space where I cut them out looks like it was snowed on with little niddled dots of paper everywhere. I'm really pleased with how it came out!
I'm in the middle of Ayn Ran's "Atlas Shrugged" right now and it's almost like reading a soap opera at this point. I like Dagny and wish James would just shrivel up and die and I'm also hoping Rearden gets rid of Lillian. Nobody ruin it for me!

Waiting for my Squid to come in....

2007-11-11T20:10:00.000-08:00

It's obvious that I have neglected my blog this past week. I've been way too busy. I've had a case of the blues as well and here is where this little image comes in. So I was feeling sorry for myself one night and feeling particularly sluggish. When I feel like "rotting" my brain on some TV for extended hours at night I usually turn on the science channel as I frequently get inspiration for images from their shows. One thing I really like about the science channel is that if they are showing a repeat program and there have been developements as of late on the subject material, they will tack them on towards the end and constantly update the show. Anyways, I made a woodblock print some months back of a giant squid that I had watched a program about. That show happened to be on last night. A japanese squid scientist (I can't remember his name!!) had studied many corpses of giant squid that had washed up along the shore or were retrieved in fisherman's nets. A real breakthrough in his profession would come if he could snap an image of a live giant squid in its own habitat. He rigged up a deep sea camera and got a very patient fisherman to take him out to sea and drop this camera once or twice a week. This research went on for TWO YEARS with no results until this summer when he finally DID snap a photo of a giant squid taking the bait. Of course, this caused a sensation but true to human nature someone immediately piped up and said that a video would have been much better. Give them an inch and they take a mile. Did Mr. Japanese Squid Scientist give up and curse his fellows for looking a gift horse in the mouth? No, he took the time to rig up an underwater video camera and set out with his trusty fisherman. He also had a camera man to film the maiden voyage and it was a good thing he did. No sooner had he sunk the camera with the bouy when he turned and on the other side of the boat floated a 24 foot long female giant squid. The camera man got footage of her gurggling and splashing water out of her mantle as her tentacles drifted and writhed about! This footage the Science Channel tacked on to the end of the program and it was a nice reward because I think Mr. Japanese Squid Scientist had worked so hard for it. I got to thinking and here lately it feels like I make a lot of effort with little headway in my career. Some people wait for their ship to come in but I feel that opportunity and life can pass you by if you don't get out and work for it. Mr. Japanese Squid Scientist got out with Mr. Generous Fisherman and dropped bait for TWO YEARS until they got any results and then just a few months after the photo, Ms. Squid just swims right up to the boat to say hello. So, what I'm really doing is waiting for my squid to come in and that's when I came up with this drawing!

2007-11-03T18:35:00.000-07:00

Been feeling kind of sluggish lately. Perhaps I need a nap.......

Candy Canes!

2007-11-01T21:31:00.000-07:00

*Whew* Here's the next set design in my holiday cards. Candy arrangement printed in white and then dusted with silver. That was back breaking. I took a moment to rest at one point and I noticed, as I sat in my chair in the afternoon sun, that the air in the studio was glittering. Word to the wise, kids, use a dust mask or better yet a paint mask when dealing with powdered pigments. I can't wait to send these out to friends!!

Shameless Self Promotion

2007-10-31T21:21:00.000-07:00

They're here! There here! My holiday cards are finally coming out of production! *Whew* Okay, maybe not clinically, but I think I might be crazy. Definately obsessive. You can read about the process and a little history behind these cards on my Etsy site (link at top of my profile) but the little glass "candies" were something else. In my wisdom, I thought that I could dab white glue straight from the bottle onto those teeny buttons. Yeah, didn't happen. The slightest pressure oozed out way too much so I found a solution through obsessive compulsion. I sat down with a straw I broke from my broom and a sake cup full of white glue and dotted them one by one. I made two passes (one for pink and one for silver) and was successful that way. I think now I shall take a nap!

Nashima's Leaf

2007-10-29T10:12:00.001-07:00

Wow!! This is a finished print from a student who took my Japanese Woodblock Printing class at the McGuffey Art Center. Isn't it absolutely beautiful?! Of course, the scanner doesn't do it justice as one layer is in gold leaf but it is still a lovely contour and fitting subject for leaf season here in Virginia. Lucky thing! She's moving to Oregan where she'll be in Woodblock Country! I'm jealous. Anyways, great job Nashima! My first print didn't turn out this good!

Jingle Bells, Ink Sure Smells, Santa's on his way!!!!

2007-10-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

This will be the anthem of christmas printers. Here's a shot of my gingerbread cookies holiday card. I'm almost done. All I have to do is print my info on the backs. I'm going to dot their little buttons with glue and spread tiny glass sprinkles on them. These cards will rock!

Ah, money....

2007-10-22T13:53:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been sick the past couple of days and therefore rendered useless for a time. This is an old image that I did when I was attending the Corcoran. They have an event every christmas called "Off the Walls" where students can purchase a table and sell their work for some christmas cash. I like the idea because it gives students a taste of selling and dealing with customers (if you were lucky enough not to have to wait tables and the like). They would have a constest for a postcard design and this was mine. I lost but no big deal. I now have this nice image.
Point is I'm chewing my nails now over christmas stock. I've got to get the lead out and produce those christmas cards!!! I'm excited as I'm nearing the end of my Dragon Book and am awaiting the arrival of book board and 50 bone clasps in the mail. I still haven't made a decision as far as bookcloth or cover paper, argh!! I'm also hoping to have another tree cut book so maybe that will be the subject material for the next month. Who knows?

Stamp!

2007-10-18T19:18:00.000-07:00

Yay! My stamp came in the mail today! Okay, I do love it and I will use it for a few months to get good use but I'm already thinking about designing a new logo. After seeing how much detail is lost in shrinking the image, I'm guess not many will know that it is a ferret riding a printing press. Also, unless you are a printmaker, there is no way in hell you'd fathom that the dark table-like shape is a press. Ah well, chalk it up to experience! At least my text came out well!

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehaw!

2007-10-16T18:39:00.000-07:00

This is what I did all day on monday (which is not saying too terrible much). I was wiped out and didn't get up till 11:45am. Monday is my only day off and even then I do art! Thusly, I contend that for a true artist, art making is not a past-time but a bodily function. Anyways, this was on my to-do list as christmas is knocking on my door telling me to finish my christmas cards and get them out on the shelves. I can't do that until I get my etsy store and email stamped on every last one. I can't do that until I get a custom stamp and I can't do that until I finish a logo. And there you have it. The rubber stamp is currently in route to my house! Yay!
Anyways, I wanted to come up with an image that embodied a few things. Thing number one of course is Pistoles. You can catch that explanation in the post labeled "Ride 'M Ferret." Thing number two is relief printing which is illustrated in bucking C&P. Thing number three is the joy of printmaking exuded my a printing troupe from Tennessee called "Yeehaw Press." They came and did a demo at the Corcoran for the Southern Graphics Council meeting a few years back and those people rocked. Their love of printing and joy in the process as well as wild outfits and attitudes was infectious! I initially had the ferret weilding a cowboy hat and gunbelt slung with ink knives and a tube of ink but I abandoned that idea. I think the image still reads well without it.

Hand-pulled Harvey!

2007-10-15T09:40:00.000-07:00

Yay, Harvey! Someone asked me what he's got. You decide! After we finish printing images for the beastiary, I want to print him up for my own personal christmas cards to read the greeting "May you recieve all your holiday wishes, be they diamonds or be they snowflakes!" I think only the people who know about Harvey will be getting them. It might startle some to receive a beast in the mail for christmas! I wouldn't mind a beast for christmas!

Kirin Proof

2007-10-14T20:37:00.000-07:00

Yay! I've got no complaints! That one scuff on the shoulder is from me inadvertantly tapping the paper on the block as I was showing my student how to pull proofs. Actually, I'd like to experiment more with scuffing and different texture. I wish I new the artist's name....I saw a printer's work from Japan who did prints of everyday people and his family all in textural value and it was amazing! I was like he knew how to scuff an area to resemble the countour of a nose or cheek in one stroke. Anyways, I used a few scraps of mulberry to print this up and I'm glad with the results. You'll notice my Kirin has no scales. I was going to add them in the sketch but I enjoyed his contours so I am going to give him a dappled coat to resemble scales in my color bock. Any votes as to what color he should be?

Kirin in the wood

2007-10-13T16:11:00.000-07:00

I think the image translates nicely for the class I'm teaching! I was going to carve it in All Shina, a product that McClain's sells, but in true fashion I always forget at least one item in the many that commutes with me to and from the studio and that was it. I left my nice piece of Shina at home! :( I am blessed, however, in that my sister's husband is a carpenter and he gives me left over scrap wood that would otherwise end up in the dump. I had a peice of 3/4 inch plywood in the studio and gave it a try. The grain held up okay but beneath the veneer lay a layer of soft fibrous wood that seemed to me rather weak. I put woodglue in a particularly large split that appeared beneath the face part of the kirin and am none too keen on the large black knot on the other end. We'll see what happens when I pull a few proofs....

Pistoles Press

Fatter Fatness!

Dragonflies and Damselflies

Lana won't be at the Market this Saturday!

More fun prints and handmade stamp goodness this Saturday!

Exchange #47 Spoiler Alert!

2010 Charlottesville Holiday Market

Irons in the Fire

Raucous Auction Tomorrow!

Crozet Meadows Fall Display of the Arts

Bulls, Billy Goats, and Cork Stamps!

Things you neeb to know about printmaking

Finished Squids

Balizoma Prints

Parade of Ghosts

Spots and Templates

Closing in

Two Posts in One Day?!

Sparkling Squid!

Goal!

The Cold Push

Christmas Squid

Epic Book of Draconic Struggle

Two More Swimmers for the Pool

Proofing Indigenous Ink

Cook'n up some Ink

Lovely Spines

20 tiny trilobites

Extended Absence

Dragon Books

Limulus emerging

You shall have your Proof!

Two Dragons One Pearl

The Weasel will seek any way in....

On and on...

Got a camera now!

The Year of the Ox

Camera Crippled!

The Trilobite

Limulus polyphemus

Un-Enrollment

The familiar taste of Crow

Ready for the last block!

More development as the Persimmon readies for its debut!

What got into me?

Know thy self

Holiday Figs

McGuffey Holiday Open House!

Farm People in Ink

More Farm People!

Book of Life: Page One

Baren Wrapping

Rain Soaked Mountains

Farm People

Billowing Clouds and Fluttering Waves

Here Comes the Sun!

The Seedless Watermelon

Big Ole' Update O' Everything!

Book of Life Update

Labradorite

Wazzermelonz!

Book of Life Update

The Seedless Watermelon

Some observations of my own...

Berry Helper

Book of Life Update

Under the Archeopteris Tree

First of the Season

More design work...

The Archeopteris Tree

Ghetto Studio

Alternate Realities

Design Stages....

CONTEST: The Book of Life

So Close!

Maru Bake Illness!

The Strawberry Roan!

Chocolate Pages

Sailing Along

Chocolate Books