Mid Trash

I think I'm about half way.
I'm printing off the 3rd block and have taken 5 impressions so far.
The print is in that "oh my god, what was I thinking" stage where my hi key color came out too flat and my low key color is way too yellow.....oh well, that's what haste and bad lighting will do......

I've printed three times off the Okoume block and while it is a bit delicate--occasionally it has a fiber that sticks up and wants to print-- but it's printing well. The vertical wood grain is visible as a texture on the paper but not pronounced in the print the way pine would print as a strong wood grain.

Detail: all but the keyblock are printing off Okoume marine plywood.So far Yellow, then red and then brown off the same block.

I'll definitely use it in the future and will explore it's limits/possibilities some more.
As All-shina isn't available in Italy, it's a decent (but not inexpensive alternative).

Tucked prints in the freezer for a few days....too much going on to safely print.
Hope to finish it though by next week.

Okoume

Graces Block #3 Proof--cerulean blue on proof paper

 I carved one side of my Cherry/Okoume plywood blocks on the Okoume side.
This is a quick proof to check the block.

It carves very easily--like shina--although it is much softer. But I was able to carve and clear the open areas, as well as the small voids of the closure tapes and so far, so good. Easy to cut, not too splintery or shreddy, a little fibrous and with a very visible grain pattern.
This was printed hastily and a little wet.....neither the block or brush are really charged so it is not yet a good example but it prints with a pretty pronounced goma-zuri effect but it looks pretty good.
I doubt I could get a perfectly smooth impression but that's ok.

I'll get a better idea when I'm printing for real........and will show better photos then.
But this is pretty serviceable.......

Graces Hanshita

Printed keyblock; the area colored in will be the next block.

Slow progress but I've finished the keyblock.
Now I'm printing a few hanshitas before I clean out the area of inside the bags.

As I suspected the lines are a bit chunky; but for this image, which I'm hoping to print a bit sloppily it should be ok.

Registration will be an issue for the little ribbon ties.

I'm still working out color and printing sequences.
Hope to carve another block today/tomorrow.

Cherry Ply

About 4-5 years ago I found a pretty nice slab of local Italian Cherry and had the local lumberyard cut it into thinner planks.
I didn't take into consideration the width of the blade; and I was trying to economize by getting as many planks as possible from the thick board....I ended up with planks that were only about 1 cm thick. I've used them as is-- even carved on both sides--but they're prone to warping and I was hesitant to try anything larger than my yearly zodiac cards.

I found a local carpenter however who has been intrigued by my woodblocks and as he has an enormous hydraulic, hot-water press---used to laminate doors, tables, etc.-- he offered to laminate these onto some plywood. He insisted however I use marine plywood ( I told him I wanted a water-resistant glue...).

So I found a piece of local marine plywood (Okoume)--not cheap either --and he took my cherry planks and had me come by and pick them up a week later.
He trimmed them to be flat sided and I had him cut the smaller ones to 30cm length....These are the remnants--the ends that were left-- they're about 22 by 27cm by 2.4 cm thick.
 

Cherry/Okoume: About 2.5cm thick, the cherry alone is 1cm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don't think warping will be an issue

Cherry side

The Okoume side

Not sure if the Okoume will be useable but I'll try; it's soft, has a very pronounced grain and looks like it will want to flake off.

These will be part of the Trash bag print I'm working on.
I think I'll need a total of 6 plates....I think 3 cherry and the 3 backs will make up the others.

Trash redux

It's nice to be carving cherry again.

I  decided to start in on my backlog of "Prints to Do" list and this trash bag doodle was in the stack near the top.

Trash bag doodle from my sketchbook

I had gotten as far as a neatly-drawn line drawing and transferred that to an acetate and then to this block with some carbon paper.

This is a 9 x 12" American cherry/birch plywood block I had purchased from McClains about a year ago.
I hope to use the Birch Ply back for one of the color blocks.

The Three Graces (key block in progress)

I've been carving now for a couple of days....stealing an hour or two from other things when I can.
I have an idea for the color blocks but it's still pretty ill defined. I'm hoping to do a partial reduction but using multiple blocks still to allow for lots of overlap of colors (and chances to fix any errors).

Bamboo Skin

 If you have a Japanese Garden nearby--now is the time to pay them a visit.  Specifically, go check out the bamboo gardens.  Bamboo grows about a foot a day. Botanically a grass, it has culms, long segmented stems and each of these is protected by a sheath during the growth phase and small terminal leaf that drops from the growing stalk as it gets taller, one for each segment. A good stand of bamboo will be dropping or will have already dropped dozens of these.  

The Takenokawa, is the dried bamboo-leaf that is used to cover the baren coil and serves to help distribute the pressure while protecting the paper from the coil bumps and friction. I get mine from Japan via post (Woodlike Matsumura) or from McClains in the US.
They're hard to ship so end up costing about $5-7.00/each due mostly to shipping costs. (although, if I get them with a roll of paper they usually ship inside the paper roll). I usually buy 5-10 at a time.
But now that I print harder--I go through them faster.  My testing of a duct tape cover or the shelf paper (works pretty well) was due to the fact that I just have 2-3 left and I'm saving them for serious printing.

Fallen Bamboo-Culm Sheaths

I had another of my "Hey, these might work!" moments walking in the garden again this week and noticing the stand of bamboo that hides the old well and pumphouse.
We have 2-3 patches of bamboo on the grounds.  I had long ago looked at, then discarded them as a local source for Takenokawa as being too narrow.  But when I covered my last baren--I was surprised how much wider it got with dampening and stretching.  So I went back to the bamboo patch for another look.  Most are stands of a thinner bamboo used for staking in the garden but this patch--planted probably 200 years ago to hide the even older pump/well--has quite a few thicker shoots--some a little more than 2inches/5-6cm in diameter. I looked over the fallen skins and selected out the ones that weren't damaged and that seemed to have come off the larger stems.

Compared to the purchased Takenokawas I've used in the past;
these are thinner in thickness and a little narrower...they look like 8-9cm when they're dry/shriveled or all curled up but they're pretty long and there were a lot of them. So just out of curiosity,  I got an old one and dampened it under warm running water and carefully opened it up uncurling it under the water and then measured the open leaf.....gee, now it's almost 11cm wide......

Leaf dampened under running water then carefully stretched/smoothed out with fingers. Now it's almost 11cm wide.

I rubbed the inside with a smooth stone to iron out the ribs/wrinkles and measured again. 12 cm! Wow, this is going to work. 

So, since I still had one left-over cardboard round and a length of twisted cord I decided to quickly put together another baren so I could test if these skins would work to cover a smaller baren....In addition, I made a few alterations from my last one to see if I can get more pressure and a more effective baren from the same materials.

I coated the braided cord with acrylic medium to harden it up and stiffen the cord. I trimmed the disc to madke it a little smaller-- 11.5cm diameter so it would better approximate the Murasaki baren I was comparing it to and be small enough for the skins I had found.  I glued two thick paper concentric circles on the side the cord would be glued to to make it just a tad covex.
I didn't like the shiny gold of the back---it's made to go under cakes--so I also glued a thin sheet of washi to the back just to make it less ugly.
Then as just a quick trial,   I dampened one of the uglier skins and quickly stretched it out by working across the grain until it opened up. Then used a river rock and a hard surface to stretch it further and smooth the grain.  It went from about 9cm wide to 12cm wide and covered the baren with nothing to spare. It had a few splits but it didn't get worse or fall apart when it dried, so encouraged,  I tried again with a better skin.
This one was JUST barely wide enough once prepped. But it's on. Very smooth and looks pretty good.

Trial leaf; it fit, but had a few splits so I tried again. 

Finished Baren with Home-grown Takenokawa

Tomorrow, I'll test it out.
But first I went back to score a few more skins.

Zig Zag

Mostly ZAG  7.5"x 10" moku hanga woodblock print; ed 35

 I had this little print in my mind for some time. 
Imagined as an exercise in overlapping colors and simple shapes.
Just three colors:
Hansa Yellow
Napthol Red Medium
Pthalo Blue (green shade)
and a little sumi added in the last impression.

There was a flame-like textile in the 1500s renaissance Florence (and I can still see examples during my walks past the Antique shops in the city center) and the Missoni brand fabrics sold downtown and internationally still borrow from that design pool. But if I'm surrounded by zigzag motifs locally it was a foreign weaving that I had in mind when I sketched out the little drawing that would become this print.

The textile I was thinking about was this one:

 It's a Baluch flat-weave cover or kilim. It is asymmetric and dyed with all-natural vegetal dyes with an amazing purple and rich orange and madder red and blue. It is long and narrow and would have been used originally to cover bags or belongings in the back of a nomads tent, or as a decorative hanging in the rear. Woven in Afghanistan about 100 years ago I find it abstract and Modern in an aesthetic that seems to defy style or fashion and time.
It was in storage however (see the roof entry from late Feb) when I was working on it and I had just a vague memory of how it was constructed.   I had  the print all planned out and had finished the keyblock when I pulled it out to check for colors.
 I noted that it was pretty different than I had remembered and I'd have changed the blocks if I had seen it earlier.
(I'd have included the steps in the diagonals--they add a lot of energy).

The Yellow block I printed very strongly to allow the later green and orange to glow.
The red was printed medium strength and the blue fairly lightly to allow for a nice green and purple--and then reprinted (using a different block) to deepen just the blue stripe and the outlines.

Very simple but not all that interesting in the end.

The original textile is much more captivating and beautiful. This is once again one of those examples where the original idea remains far more interesting than the finished print.
But I am working towards getting stronger and more vibrant colors--- this is a far cry from the wan and weak colors I was still getting just a few years ago.

The bright white version on Magnani incisioni printed surprisingly well; I only used these for proofing the blocks as they're still pretty hard to print by hand and the reject rate (due to slippage) is higher than with the thinner and more transparent Japanese washi.

TheWashi edition (on Mura Udabon Smooth from the Japanese Paper Place) has a nice imprinted wood grain--the paper is dried on wooden boards; and LOTS of little inclusions that became more obvious during printing as they acted as a resist to the colors.

It was my contribution to the Baren Forum Print Exchange #56 and 31 copies went by post to L.A. yesterday.