Stab binding class
A few images of students sewing their books together in last night’s Stab Binding class:
And here’s a lovely finished book with tea-stained Rives BFK covers (photo courtesy Monica Rock):
Archives for “teaching”
Today in the studio: trace monotypes!
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.
Reductive woodcut class: day two
These two student prints got their second colour, and the images are starting to take shape!
Both opted to skip red and go straight to blue for the second colour: a pale cobalt and white mix on the left, and a bolder cobalt on the right, both with a lot of transparent base to blend them with the yellow. By the end of class these blocks were all carved and ready for the third colour, which we’ll print at the beginning of next week’s class!
Reductive woodcut class: first day
On the first Monday night after opening the studio we dove right into an intensive three week course with reductive woodcut printing. Reductive colour work isn’t an easy concept for non-printmakers to wrap their heads around at first, but these students are quickly getting the hang of it. They carved out the white areas on their blocks and printed their first colour, yellow:
In a reductive relief print, you’re working backwards, starting with the lightest colour and gradually moving towards the darkest, carving out successive layers from a single block. You start by carving out only what you want to remain empty, or the colour of the paper, and print a light colour (yellow). Then you carve out everything you want to leave yellow, and print the next colour. And so on.
Here are some of the first prints, drying:
The next colour will probably require more carving than the first did, but now that they’re into a groove we’re going to shoot for carving and printing two colours next week. Stay tuned!
Fall workshops
This fall I’ll be offering three workshops at Mackenzie Hall Cultural Centre: Absolute Beginner Knitting, Beginner Draw & Sketch, and Beginner Portraiture. They’re all one-time three hour sessions. For all the details, visit my Workshops page!
Self portrait drawing by Kiausha Burch, a student in my first year drawing class at the University of Georgia, Fall 2006.