In the Studio

This is the final image. I looked at the one I printed with more colored leaves and kept going back to the first one I carved and printed. It had less leaves but more importantly it had the simple gum nuts. I tried lightening up the gum nuts that I had carved white spaces into and then only embossing the new leaves (note print on left). Then I just said to myself that maybe some of the leaves were just too cartoonish for lack of a better word. I turned the board over and in no time had a new block carved with corrections but still using my original drawing as a guide. Now I have the print on the right. Note that I decreased the embossing lines around the subject matter and the framing area.

So now you can see the differences in the original print from the older carving and the transitions to the latest image. And because I liked the way it looked I decided to see if I could scan it into the computer and get the feel of the print by making several adjustments so that I could turn it into a card. Here it is.

And liking how this looked I got out the Australian Land Fish print I carved and printed in Australia last spring using watercolors made from the soils there and came up with another card after scanning one of the prints I brought home.

These are the things I learned today in reworking the board. First of all waking up in the night with a fully formed image in your head does not necessarily mean it will happen. Second, pure white paper is better than warm white which in Stonehenge is too yellow. And thirdly take the time to get the correct tool for the job in your hand first.

For some reason I thought there needed to be more leaves in the almost too much of a white background. So in image number two I added several and used another watercolor to fill them in, Victoria Green and a softer red for the stems, Emily Gap Northern Territory Orange instead of Red. So there are two different greenish greys for the leaves.

I printed the image using a warm white by Stonehenge and found it too yellow. And I thought I needed a another leaf off on the left side background so it did not look like it was dripping from the middle of the page. AND I also thought the gum nuts needed to have more white on them but not totally, so I carved out some of the brown areas. They are okay but I really think I like the plain old gum nuts of the first image better. But like I said in the previous blog, you can’t add back in the wood.

So here is the third one redone with only the Victoria Green used for the leaves along with the softer red of Emily Gap Northern Territory Orange, and the extra leaf all done on a crisp white paper. This time I enlarged the groove around the outside of the image and embossed it with the correct tool….a teaspoon I borrowed somewhere in Australia and did not return. Notice in the second yellowish image that I tore the embossing of the outline because I used the same tool I used for embossing the leaves, etc of the image.

I just wanted to add this picture of the very first white line print I carved in a class offered by Mary Walker in Highlands, NC about five or six years ago. It was done on the pine board with knots that she handed out for us to use. This is the photograph I took to  class to extract an image of Eucalyptus leaves and gum nuts.

If nothing else I have made improvements in wood selection, carving and painting, but wonder if the simpler images are much better for this technique.

I am making up some samples of books that could accommodate the addition of prints. The spine must be made deeper to keep the book from having covers that won’t close properly after the additions.

And I am trying several that have no sewn bindings that will do the job. There are classes coming up in Australia in February and March of next year and I think these particular bindings could be very useful; not only for the addition of small prints but other papers as well.

I have also devised a way for a coptic binding to not only hold the prints but the previous page to act as a framing device for the print. The print could actually be removed from this design and then popped back in.

The more I have worked on them the more I realize that with planning ahead, a text such as poetry could be printed on the left hand page. It would require working out the image with appropriate text and laying it all out in the inkjet printed page. I think I will try this.

And I must remember to make a mock up first. This was one of two things that my instructor, John Risseeuw, insisted on back in 1994 when I took his class at Arrowmont. The other thing he stressed was have your content before you even start to make the pages for a book. Everything about the book, paper, form, binding, etc should reflect what the book is about. I do not recall making many blank journals in his class. And they were usually made from scrap materials to demonstrate simple bindings. He along with Dolph Smith were the two workshop instructors I learned the most from in the very few classes I ever enrolled in. Both stressed form following content.

I am presently enrolled in another class coming up at Arrowmont that focuses on surface techniques. Hopefully I will learn from the two designers teaching this class additional ways to have the “feel” of a book reflect more of what the book is about.

It has been several years since I was at Arrowmont and that was when I was teaching a class titled Content and Containment of Intimate Spaces, all about housing the bits and pieces of a personal experience. Some of my most memorable students have come from teaching this class. Their stories stay with me long after they have made their books and placed them into customized boxes of hidden spaces and objects of great importance to their stories.

The instructors for the class coming up at Arrowmont are asking that the students bring in samples of their work to see how their techniques can be helpful. I like that. Now I have two months to figure out just what to show them. It will probably involve earth pigments and the surfaces of books and boxes, but could be other things as well. I will just have to see what is going on in the studio by then. Right now I need to get back in there and begin coloring wood block prints of an iconic Australian tree using watercolors made from the soils down under.