Happy New Year

Wishing all a happy and healthy, productive and creative New Year.

Hope any who need direction will find it and those who already are where they want to be will share coherent directions.

Auguri and Best Wishes,

Andrew

Rabbits

Year of the Rabbit, 2011; Preliminary Sketch

It's been AGES since I did any carving and despite having Taxes and loads of other more important things to attend to I decided to get to work on my already late "Year of the Rabbit" cards.

My image was drawn from a nice photo of a jackrabbit on the web stylized a bit to allow for some easier carving and loosely drawn in a format that will suit a small postcard-sized image.

Sami, looking at this and the half-dozen earlier sketches had asked,
"Why don't you add an earring?" and the idea was planted and it was a good one.
This is the year of the METAL rabbit and multiple piercings are all the rage here in Santa Cruz, (Northern California) and elsewhere so this will be just perfect.

This image became the hanshita and I've just finished carving and proofing the keyblock. Next the proofs will get glued down to new boards to allow for the color blocks; I'm thinking probably four color blocks in addition to the keyblock.

Dominos

Well, enough of all that etching silliness. TIME to get back to woodblocks!
I like to use my woodblocks as a sort of home study course.
I've had trouble getting really dark and rich blacks and the subject of the next print is really just a pretext for this task.

Here's one of the original doodles. The domino originated as a white ivory tile with black pips (ebony wood) but for my purposes I went with the black version--usually black painted wood with white dots. I wanted something black, that I could print in a varied way and still have it be interesting.

My original sketch was of a domino with a six and a one but then, at the food store I saw this....and was crushed.

I thought about changing paths/ideas--especially as this one is a bit thin, content-wise. But after waffling and postponing, I finally just charged ahead.
Drinking some of the bottle helped. It's not bad. So I went back to the sketchbook and tried again:

This is the preparatory drawing for the blocks, colored in with colored pencils.

The liveliness comes from the handling of the color; in this case I've colored in using black, over red, over ochre, over yellow, each time laying color on the paper and the rough oak table underneath imparts an irregular surface to the color.
Achieving this kind of color/liveliness/richness with water based, transparent pigments in a block print is the challenge. I'll need several blocks and have to print each multiple times to achieve anything near this interesting....we'll see...

I glued my hanshita's down and started carving. I finished the keyblock last week; blocks 2 and 3 tonight.
Should be able to get the next three carved tomorrow?