This is what lies under the marble dust"powdered sugar".
And here's the block it printed from:
Then, another block, fairly similar but with the donut shapes just slightly smaller was used to print a mixture of gum arabic and paste transferring the glue lightly with the baren to the surface of the paper.
I then sifted (I used a very fine tea seive) very finely ground marble dust (used for gesso) onto the damp glue and then tapped it off.
Despite being almost talc-like in consistency it fell in smallish granules (I think due to electrostatic charges) but gave pretty close to the effect I wanted.
(I had also tried talc and rabbit skin glue as alternatives). The talc worked great but the print smelled like a beauty parlor and while Marble dust is inert and safe to work with the talc isn't really good to breathe so I didn't want to be dusting it on 20-30 prints.).
I wasn't too sure how permanent my "sugar" printing would be so I made sure there was a good layer of color underneath in case the sugar falls off (It's pretty heavy and seems to like to shed of rub off if you touch it). But there's a donut underneath just in case.
Although it might have been more coherent to print these sketches first, I wanted to include some of the preparatory drawings that I used to create this print.
I can't remember if it was from a dream, or just something I jotted in while on the phone or doing something else but this print started off as a sketch pretty much like these later ones, done to try to fit the paper size restrictions for the exchange I was participating in.
It went through lots of iterations and originally would have been a broader/bigger format. However, the Baren Forum exchange #54 for which this was my entry had a defined size: Hosoban,
which would have traditionally come from a half sheet; torn again into vertical thirds giving a pronounced vertical/horizontal axis at 5.7" x 13".
Meanwhile, while back in the US I ordered some new papers to try out hoping to find some papers to bring back to Italy.
The paper I hoped to use, Kizuki Kozo from the Japanese Paper Place in Toronto, they recommended as one of their favorite already-sized papers for moku hanga.
It's a lovely paper but thinner than I had hoped (40g/m2) and felt pretty soft, with some fibers already visibly protruding on the surface.
And indeed, it proved to be a little too soft and lightly sized for my purposes as on the first 1-2 impressions the paper seemed to stick to the block/get surface abrasions and the finished proofs were a little too matte and soft in color (a sign of not enough size).
So just after starting my actual print run I actually abandoned the 26 sheets I had cut of this paper and had to cut down new paper made up of what I had on hand in Italy.
( I had two full sheets of Kihada--a heavy mulberry/pulp paper from Japan (Woodlike Matsumura), a few small pieces of Echizen Kozo (McClains), and some midweight kozo/pulp paper whose name had fallen off last year.).
I cut these down, dampened them and these became the final prints--
(with the addition of 4-5 of the original kizuki kozo that I kept printing on for reference).
Meanwhile, I still have the 26 pieces of Kizuki Kozo that I had started to print on--the first yellow background bokashi got printed before I pulled them out of the stack... so I decided I will have another go in the future but with additional size.
Just before heading back to the US this week, I mixed up a batch of winter size and once they were dry I re-sized them with a mixture of 5g alum/17g glue to 1L water. (It might be too strong as there is some size already on this paper and they ended up a little too "shiny").
These have since been dried; and put aside to settle/age. They'll be ready to print on when I head back to Florence in January.
I hope to have a go at a variant printing:
I'd like to cut another block; I still want to see what that wavy oak block from my first post/idea will print as a background and I think I'd like to play with a blue/gray background and splotches to make it a little more subtle.
So stay tuned for a second state.
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