Fall Into Place

I feel like I'm returning to my roots a bit here with this one. When I first started printmaking, I admired the work of other printmakers who captured the beauty in everyday scenes. I tried - oh how I tried - to emulate them. 

I remember one print I tried to do, a simple one with a bountiful lilac bush outside a weathered clapboard house. Hooboy, it was a stinker. I knew nothing about color, or how to study one's subject. Hell, I don't even think I worked from a drawing.

This one has been different. Not only have I solved the bulk of my technical issues, but I have learned to really think through the color sequence.

I'm still not sure why I insist on starting with the darker colors. Maybe the challenge excites me.

There's several colors left, so stay tuned for how it falls together.
 

Elsie Alive

 

Finished at last! This print was going to be complicated, but I just wasn't prepared for HOW complicated. "Elsie" ended up being somewhere between 9 and 15 colors, and I was never sure if it was going to work nout. Several times I thought it might be scrapped. In the end, I only got about 4 decent prints (started with ten).

The main problem I had was that, at the start, I experimented with under-inking the block. This gave the print a very light, gauzy appearance, which I loved. The problem is, as the ink sits on the paper, it's like a butte, little flattened islands of color. When you print the next layer, you only print on the tops of those buttes, and the print area gets successively smaller with each layer of ink. By the end, those little islands have become mountains, with narrow, sloping tops. It becomes harder and harder for each color to print. 

But in the end, I have depth, shadow and color. I don't think that I conveyed enough that the blue bottle on the right is actually the shadow of the bottle (left).

The figurine is a UCTCI Japan figurine from the 1960s. My wife found her at an estate sale in a big old warehouse on Main Street in Buffalo. Since finding her some 15 years ago, Elsie (named for her Grandmother) has been joined by many sisters.

Rumination

 Here we are at color #9, and something unexpected happened: the background color is, unfortunately, blending in too much with the figurine's hood. It's not quite as blended in this photo, and I haven't yet looked at the print under natural light.

I have two options: either redesign the print so the background color is lighter, and hope that the contrast is enough, or design it as darker. The problem is that whatever I choose as a design for the background needs to work with a light OR dark color. The reason is that, if I choose to make the background light, and I find light makes the hood too washed out, I can switch to dark, and vice versa.

The case for dark is seen here. You can see the contrast. The down side is, depending on what color I choose, the pot she's holding risks disappearing.

Conversely, because the hood is so light, the hood may not pop. Stay tuned!

MISTER Ulean?! That's SIR Ulean to YOU, bub!

Firs color down was a very dark Cerulean blue. I plan out my colors different than most printmakers in that I like to work dark to light. It helps me to steer colors the way I want them. I also plan the colors so one layer is enhanced by the previous layer. For example, the next color will be a lighter version of this, and the one after that will be a green. I would never put a yellow or red next, because it would change the color.

Fresh Start

It's been almost a year since I've posted, and bit longer since I've had a print to show. I've been working very hard on cartooning, which I hope will bring something to my printmaking at some point.

It's been very relaxing to study cartooning, and gives me an opportunity to study perspective, color and composition.

But, of course, it always comes back to printmaking...

The struggle to find the time is unchanged. I have remained essential, as I work in the medical manufacturing sector.

But I do have fun!

Damp Details

 This Traffic signal was the original seed of this print, a childhood memory of my neighborhood. Obviously, it was not the focus, but I love that the red and green held through all of the printing.

Whether it's clear or not that there is a church among the hazy buildings in back doesn't matter -- the silhouettes are there for depth (this place exists only in my mind and, now,bon paper). However, a fun note is that the rosette window is a spontaneous tribute to Notre Dame Cathedral, which burned during the making of the print.

The block is destroyed during the making of a reduction woodcut. Trying to explain the process to non-printmakers is a challenge. This should drive the point home.

Rainy Day

9x7 reduction woodcut, 10 colors.

Day Brightener

The mantra in the studio is "trust the process." Reduction woodcut is much different than other forms of block printing. I work from a cartoon, which is a road map for the print. I transfer the image to the block using carbon paper, though the block absorbs pigment, making the tracings almost invisible. The biggest challenge is color. Colors react to colors around them, but because I won't know how the colors will act until the print is done, I need to trust the palette I selected at the outset.

 Here you can see how the colors seem different. Another interesting thing is that the top color, a very light pink/beige, looked completely different when printed alone, more of a putty gray. But with the red under it, it casts a bit Pinker, which is why I printed in this order. I printed the brown over the green for the same reason -- printing red on green would have made the red too dark.

New Work In Progress

 New print in the works.

A Thousand Points of View

 In my day job as a color master and ink technician, I know how important lighting is to correct perception of color (or at least consistency). After finishing"Harbor Lights" I felt the colors could have been more intense. I tacked it up on the living room wall to so my wife and I could study and critique.

This morning, with the room full of bright natural light, I was surprised to find that the colors were far more vibrant than I thought.

The top photo is in natural light, the bottom in the yellow of blued incandescent. Quite a difference!

"Harbor Lights"

Eleven color reduction woodcut print, "Harbor Lights." I'm very, very happy with how this turned out. I wish I had been bolder in the sky colors, but I wasn't going for the bleeding sky of Munch's "The Scream," but more the gentle sunset of a warm summer evening on Lake Erie. But I've opened up a new avenue for the use of bright pigments in my work.

Closing Time

 Only one color left. One of the bad parts about reduction printing is that, as you pile layers of ink, the natural unevenness causes the final colors to be a bit patchy. I've seen this on multiple block prints too. I used to worry about it a lot until I got to see a Gustave Baumann print up close recently. Sometimes, as artists, we have to embrace those imperfections.

This is a very dark red. Maybe too dark? We'll see. It's hard to gauge how colors will look on completion. For example, though the sky looks really good, but I kind of wish I'd gone bolder. But then maybe it would be to cartoon?

Developing Story

As I've often said, reduction woodcut is like watching a Polaroid develop. There are stages, early on, when you aren't sure it's going to look right. Then, the image comes into focus, and panic turns to anticipation. What I love is that the colors begin to pop as I near completion.

Greatest Hits

The Etsy shop is up and running again, and everything gets free shipping. Just click on the photo of my press at the top of the page! There you'll see such award-winning gems as:

Lighten Up

 The first four states of my latest print. I am using fluorescent pigments in white to achieve a glowing sky. Pretty happy with the results.

Floating An Idea

Etsy shop is now back up. Just click on the picture of my press!

Whatever your impression of Buffalo, you haven't experienced it without a Kayak trip down the Buffalo River (not to confuse it with the Niagara River, on which a fellow DID try to navigate Niagara Falls once; that didn't go so well). A blend of rich history, the heroic reclamation of the land by nature, rust vs wood. Stop by the shop for more details!

New Year Funnies (or so I think)