All that printmaking makes me hungry!

Two leftover pears in the fridge, a mostly eaten bag of semisweet chocolate chips and a lack of anything sweet and baked to munch on....what to do.

Alexander and I whipped out a mostly invented recipe for upside-down pear cake but added chocolate chips and left out the maple syrup. Bar Petrarca in Florence makes a killer pear and chocolate butter cake but we're just too far away.
Hope this will fill the void.

Still steaming from the oven. Hope it cools soon enough to eat some.

Toggle emerging

Raining today and for the first time I'm having trouble keeping my paper dry enough.

Two more impressions on my Toggle print.

The first a pale gray solid shape to give mass tone to the bolt, then a roughly carved shadow block--I've learned that this doesn't have to be carved as neatly or detailed as the detail will be carried by my keyblock that will print over it.

I tried to post shots of each stage but my scanner isn't picking up the pale blue-grey of the thin wash-like colors at all so this one image shows those two impressions over the light blue-green background.

Tomorrow I hope to print the keyblock over the previous three impressions...It may be so damp in my studio I'll have to move into the kitchen.

Printing again

Starting on my Toggle print.
I managed to get one block printed today. A simple, single-color even wash.
It's a mixture of pthalo blue green and pthalo blue mixed with lots of rice paste to make a very transparent wash.
I usually would have started with the keyblock--the black and white block that outlines most of the color areas and in this case carries all the details, but I tried printing that first but my good printing paper is slightly uneven textured and was picking up some of the ink from the carved out areas from the shallowly carved letters.

SO I switched the order and am printing this block first--the pressure of printing the paper against the hardwood block will smooth out the paper and make getting a clean impression easier down the line. The line of very small print will end up printing over the bottom of the blue square later.

Here's the block I printed from and here's a very bad photo of the print pulled from it.

Sorry about the quality of the second photo--I'll replace it with a better one once I get my scanner back up.

A brief pause from our sponsors...

In the wee hours I decided to put the cat in the garage--she has started waking us all up at 4-5am when she decides it's a good time to be fed and that's getting old really fast.
But I had opened the garage door earlier in the evening and forgotten to close it.
There's water, a litter box and usually some food in a dish for her nights there.

So, walking in with the reluctant cat in my arms when I stepped on the threshold there was a lot of noise/crashing/bustle and first one large dark shape rushed past my legs and as I jumped back, cat scratching, two more furry dark shapes rushed past, climbed the fig tree and jumped onto the shed.



SO here they are.
They're called "orso lavatore" in Italian, (washing bears).

They've been turning over my garbage pail, eating/stealing all the figs, raiding the cat dish and more or less being quite a late night nuisance.

I hope they are at least fans of my work.

Patience, Grasshopper.

Well, one of the perks of the medical environment are single use, disposable scalpels. I borrowed one to see if it would work; this one came loaded with an #11 blade--a long pointed blade slightly beveled on both edges. The point is very tiny and very flexible and with a pair of 3X drugstore reading glasses and a LOT of patience to flip or clear the little bits around the letters I managed to finish all the letters last night. Fruit of a late night espresso.

Proofed today. All the letters are legible. Now to whip out the color blocks.

Hard at Work

There was not much to look at in the last post. Today, with the kids in school, Bene back at work in Italy for the next few months and my mom, visiting this month, off at a duplicate bridge game, I could actually disappear into the studio for a block of several hours.

I managed to get the keyblock almost completely carved even if this photo shows it only about 1/3rd done. It will be a fairly simple print with a fairly detailed keyblock but just a few color blocks.

The big hurdle will be some very small type at the bottom. I'm not sure the kiln-dried cherry or my big fat fingers are up to the task and I'm thinking about alternatives if I lose too many letters. Rubber stamp? Acetate drypoint? Handwriting?( I don't have access or any experience with letterpress...).

New Wood

I haven't been carving in a while and while I have a few works that still need a day or two of work to be completed, those unfinished prints are still almost a year old in concept and I feel the urge to do something new again.

I hope to have this little print done by the end of October.
While the subject is still cloaked in secrecy, I will say that I pulled out, then sawed off an end piece of my big cherry plank.

Here is that piece cut again lengthwise into two 7" X 10" pieces.
And again with the hanshita, my preparatory sketches/xeroxes glued on face down.

More to come.....