Today was a sewing day in the studio, putting the shirring into some block printed sundresses. We’ll have a bunch of these dresses, all in one of a kind fabrics hand printed in our studio, ready to debut during Walkerville Art Walk & Rock weekend.
Today I made some calendar pages for the studio wall, to better keep track of scheduling for classes and private instruction sessions. This is a handmade prototype version of a line of letterpress and screenprinted wall calendars we’ll be making for 2016!
My friend Monica came into the studio yesterday to keep me company on a rainy day while I completed a grant application. I gave her a quick lesson in trace monotype printmaking, set her up with paper and an inked slab, and she made me this wonderful print for the studio:
Those bound pockets on the shirt on the right had me swooning.
I’m going to frame it and use it to start a little collection of gifted artwork on the back wall of the studio overtop of the flat files and stereo. Kind of like that bulletin board full of one dollar bills you see in restaurants and variety stores!
Today’s printing: the second colour on our woodblock print of a Tim Hortons cup lying in a pile of dirty roadside snow. We’re holding back one print from each run so that the edition can be used to help explain the reductive process.
This block is being printed in two versions. One began with a run of gray ink on white paper, and the other with white ink on blue paper. The second run was printed in the same colour on both versions, a transparent teal. The image is already starting to come together.
There will probably be another run of white in the snow followed by a pale gray, then on to the brown and red tones of the cup.
I printed up a few more new card designs today. This first one is an old lino block that I made many years ago; it was my Xmas card print in either 1999 or 2000, back before we even came to Windsor. It’s a simple white line drawing of Polly, the bald, armless mannequin who lives on our stairs landing, as an angel. I thought it would be fun to print it again, so here’s Ms Polly in straight-out-of-the-can Gamblin ultramarine blue, printed overtop of some woodgrain and lace prints.
I also cut and printed this little lino block of falling hearts in metallic gold, to use as a sample for this evening’s letterpress cards workshop. These dried quickly and are already available in our shop!
Spent the long weekend printing up a bunch of Surprise Party In The Snow letterpress cards! They’ll be available from our website soon, but for now you have to come in to the shop to get them.
Printing linoblock scallops on top of floral fabrics for dresses!
Carving the first colour for a reductive woodcut:
I realized while teaching the reductive woodcut class that I don’t have a sample printed in stages that I can show, which would help people grasp the concept of working in reductive layers. So I started this block with an image of a Tim Hortons cup abandoned in ploughed-up roadside snow. The parts that are carved out now are what will remain white in the final print.
The colour progress will probably be as follows:
-pale gray
-pale blue
-darker gray
-yellow (just in the cup and a few highlights on the snow)
-red
-brown
I made some samples today to show what can be done in the Trace Monotype class (April 6; details here: TRACE MONOTYPE).
This little bird, measuring 4 by 5 inches, took me about 45 minutes to draw. It’s on Japanese Kitakata paper that had previously been printed with a pale blue woodcut. The ink was stiffened with magnesium carbonate but you can see that it was still a little sticky, and so the bird is enveloped in a cloud of atmospheric smudginess.
I spent more time on these three children, from a scanned negative from my granddad’s collection, circa 1957. More mag carb was added to the ink to better control the cloudy quality. You can see that with the slightly stiffer ink it was possible to get a wider range of tone, for instance in the girl’s school jacket and the little boy’s shorts, where soft pressure conveys a dark tone to the fabric while harder pressure brings out the darker shadows in the folds.
In the original photo the children stood in front of a wild garden, which I edited down in order to frame them with just a hint of foliage. This print took about three hours to complete. It’s on Japanese Tokuatsu paper, which is the paper we’ll be using in the workshop.
This wee etching press will tide us over for teaching classes and making small prints until we can get our issue sorted with the big press. It’s definitely an economy model, but it does the job, and we’ve used it in a class already. And it’s so easy to pick up and move around the studio!
