Letterpress workshop at the ARLIS/NA Conference in Indianapolis

Yesterday I attended a workshop on letterpress printmaking as part of the Art Librarian’s Society of North America’s Annual Conference in Indiana. I learned a lot, but since it was only a day-long workshop, much of the work was already prepared for us. To see more photos see http://tinyurl.com/cla3vx.

Besides an appreciation for the letterpress process, the workshop gave me some ideas about printmaking in general including how I might overlap parts of images for some interesting effects. It was also refreshing to do a group project where all of us contributed to the whole. In fact, on my way to this workshop I rode with a woman who, because she is unable to have a studio, creates artwork by setting up certain parameters and giving them to others to create her work. She is currently working on a project in which she gives participants a kind of table tent with the outline of a human figure and asks participants to create a self portrait on it and mail it back to her. She even gave me one of them to do.

 

Sketching from virtual life

I spent last week sketching from Virtual Pose. I kept getting hints from the universe that I should loosen up and draw – a long discussion on Baren forum, seeing some awesome Eric Fischl watercolors in the book Ten Breaths and on Fischl’s website, and having a nice discussion with a former A&D professor. So I took the hint and I had such fun!

 

Fifer – white line print

The Plymouth Fife and Drum Corps season is beginning!

 

Experimenting with White Line Printmaking

Still working on the boat print (although I haven’t been working on it all this time – somewhere during now and my last blog post I took a much needed week-long vacation to visit my folks in Florida).

I became very frustrated with trying to get all of the layers to align properly in this moku hanga print. Here is one of my many attempts. You can see the boat, the most critical part of the print, is askew. I threw up my hands – thew in the towel.

Around Valentine’s day I was thinking about and studying white line prints. I decided to make a quick little valentine for my family. Nothing like an easy project to get you feeling happy about art again.

I thought about doing another white line print since this one was so fun. I played with some ideas, but during yoga class one evening it dawned on me that I could try the boat print in white line. I struggled a little bit with it, but here is my last test print (it was too big to scan on my little scanner, so there may be some distortion in color and size).

There are a few issues with bleeding color, but overall I’m kind of excited about it. I absolutely love that I don’t have to worry about alignment one tiny bit. Taking that major frustration out of the equation allowed me to experiment with color. I used Winsor Newton watercolors to make this print. The colors in the sky (cobalt blue, Winsor red, and Winsor Yellow separtated out on the paper after I had printed it creating that unusual pattern. I used damp Echizen Kozo paper. I had to dig around for white line printing instructions and I’m not completely confident that I’m doing it correctly or in the most efficient manner.

Here are some white line printing resources that I used:

http://artistsjournal.wordpress.com/tag/saturday-finds/

http://www.barenforum.org/encyclopedia/entries/000_10/000_10.html

http://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu:80/F/?func=direct&doc_number=004763644&local_base=MIU01_PUB

http://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu:80/F/?func=direct&doc_number=003828894&local_base=MIU01_PUB

 

Blocks for Boat Print

Here are my carved blocks for the Boat print. I carved all four blocks on one piece of board – each on opposite corners of both sides.  I will be using an L-shaped piece of board for the kento (I did this with Bittersweet and it worked pretty well). I’ll be testing the prints this weekend.

 

Boat sketch – relearning Adobe Illustrator

Here is a sketch of my upcoming print. I invested a lot of time this past week relearning Adobe Illustrator. I learned illustrator back in the late 1980s – so long ago that I had to learn how to use a mouse in the class! I am amazed that I actually remembered some things, but there was a lot of banging my head against the wall and spending hours trying to figure out something that ended up being very simple to do. I think the time I spent will be worth it though, as it makes design adjustments much easier to do and to visualize.

 

Bittersweet – On being an artist and dealing with frustration

A few days ago, in the midst of struggling with this print, P.flashed me the flap of a dust jacket on the book he was reading. There, poised and distinguished looking beamed a photo of Robert Pinsky. “You met him once, didn’t you?” he asked. Indeed, many years ago he visited my college poetry class – way before he was the famous Poet Laureate. He was an incredible inspiration to me that I went home and wrote one of the best poems I ever wrote – you see, at the time, I wanted to be a poet. But I never became a successful poet. It was just another dream that I gave up in frustration. It was just too hard.

And that thought reminded me of the screen-saver message that David used to have on the computer – “If it were easy, everyone would do it.” It scrolled like a mantra across the desktop. I suppose it helped him focus on his dreams.

So what to do about getting frustrated? I know that I don’t want to keep giving up on my dreams. I really want to become a successful printmaker. I want to be able to weather the struggles and come out on the peaceful water at the other end.

So here are some of the ways that I use to cope with frustration. I would be interested in hearing from other artists about how they deal with this ubiquitous problem.

1. Journal about the frustration.
2. Calmly identify the problem(s) and think of at least one potential solution to try.
3. Meditate or do yoga.
4. Look to others for assistance.
5. Keep track of progress over the long term. See how far you have come.
6. Read funny cartoons, uplifting quotations, or maybe review some past compliments.
7. Get back on the horse – don’t let too much time pass before you start working on the problem again. (I have a lot of abandoned work because of this).
8. Be organized and plan ahead as much as possible to avoid frustrations in the first place.
9. Let go of the idea of perfection – go for improvement.
10. Understand that artwork always takes twice as much time and materials than you plan on.

Bittersweet was one of the most frustrating prints that I have done, but I learned a lot. I now know how to tell if paper has the right moisture content to take color without bleeding. I learned some good tricks about adjusting registration. I got better at organizing before printing. And I learned other things that I can’t even articulate.

 

Bittersweet – Test Block 2

I’m half way there and so far I’m pretty pleased with the way this print is coming along. The yellow block will be next and the final block will be orange. I just hope everything keeps lining up.

 

Bittersweet – Using Photoshop to create a precise drawing for woodblock carving

Because my Bittersweet print will be very small, I spent a lot of time converting my earlier sketch into a digital drawing with flat areas of color. It’s like creating a jigsaw puzzle or a quilt – each piece has to fit together perfectly. I started with an outline drawing, but the lines were too thick to be precise enough for carving out the different color areas.

So I scanned the drawing and filled each area with the corresponding color. I then painstakingly filled each line in the drawing so that only color butted up to color – no lines.

This drawing gave me the precise edge between colors that I needed to carve with the knife.

I flipped the drawing horizontally to compensate for the reversal that will happen when printing. I then printed out this drawing onto a very thin japanese paper by taping it to a regular sheet of paper and running it through my printer. Instead of gluing down the image with rice paste or methyl celluslose (which caused the inks in my drawing to bleed), I spray mounted my drawing to the wood. this worked really well and I will do this again. The only drawback is that I had to use paint thinner to remove the spray mount glue from the wood.

Here is a test print of the first block, printed twice, first with blue and then with a grey-brown gradation.

The final print will be on a whiter paper than this test paper.

 

Bittersweet – sketching an idea for my next print

This is an idea for my next print, sketched in colored pencil. I tweaked the color a bit in Photoshop by graying down the blues in the sky. I will need to make this print rather small because berries don’t look right if they are too big. I’m hoping I will be able to carve such small detail. A very clearly rendered outline drawing will be critical in getting good carving detail and proper registration between the colors, as well as good sharp knives.