Pnuppet.....

Letterpress 1: Andrew 0
Three words, 13 Letters, 2 spaces. What could possibly go wrong?
You can't imagine how many times I set up and then broke down the chase with my simple title.
Sure it  has to be upside down, and backwards and so I made it so. And yet somehow it was the wrong upside down, or the wrong backwards. I got the words backwards, but not the word order, or they were backwards but not upside down.....The chase will only go into the press one way, and I set the type wrong several times because I didn't take that into consideration. And in the final setup I missed the obvious (clearly visible if I hadn't already redone it 4-5 times....). I probably had it right a few of those times.....and then last night, when I was pretty sure I had it finally right:
Pnuppet.
I don't think that's a word.
Not even for scrabble.
But I'm not easily, or at least permanently, discouraged.
Today, with a fresh start, I sort of got it together......but not without a few hiccups.

But at last, I think I started using the tool closer to the way it's meant to be used.....

And so it begins.

WoodLust: Part 2

Things happen sometimes seemingly by chance.

It was actually a fair amount of work to get the stumps to this point.

During a brief visit  to California about 4 years ago, I noticed, almost too late, that a neighbor was ripping out a boxwood hedge.  I drove by, then went around the block, parked the car and asked if I could have a few of the stumps...and as they were all destined for the landfill, they said, "less for us to haul away".  So I ran home, grabbed a wheelbarrow and threw 4-5 of the best-looking ones in the barrow and hurried home. As I was leaving for Italy the next day I just threw them under cover in the garage.

I knew boxwood was ideal for really fine detail in the Japanese woodblock prints I was making and I also knew that it was the traditional wood used in end-grain woodblock illustrations from about 1500 until the early 1900's.

And that's how I started engraving.

One of the first rounds off the stump, cut and polished by hand.

"Cardinal Climber", 2014. My very first wood engraving carved from the block above.

Encouraged by my first attempt and with the stumps still slowly seasoning,  I started reading about engraving, looking at the works of engravers and illustrators, and once back in Italy, I tried engraving small pieces of a few of the woods I had available locally; olive branches and the odd round of pear or apple from the pruning we do several times a year.   Jump ahead to this year,  and now after completing a few more engravings,  I decided that the wood was probably seasoned enough to try cutting.  Since my "test" blocks have always been hand-cut, the two surfaces were never perfectly parallel, and needed to be printed by hand with a baren or a spoon. But since I'm thinking of adding text and printing with a letterpress machine.....I needed to find someone with the right tools.

Fortunately I found a local furniture maker and craftsman who was able to cut down two of the better log/stumps into flat rounds. I had him cut them 240mm high, just a tad higher than French/German lead type.........as sanding and polishing should fix that.


So now I have a few years' worth of boxwood and it's time to get to work.

The Puppet King

I  uncovered the pizza oven a few weeks ago and I noticed a strange log underneath that I didn't remember throwing under the tarp when I closed up the oven last summer. But it's been there, protected and drying for at least a year, and as I pulled it out I was struck by how heavy it felt....It clearly wasn't oak or madrone or a fruitwood, but it wasn't any of the exotics I cut down either--the tea tree or bottle brush or laurel that got heavily pruned last summer.
So I got a saw and cut off the stump end and then a round. And out of curiosity I started to sand it. 100-120-180-220-300-400-600-1200 and 1500 grits and about an hour or two later, I had a glass-smooth round of wood about 4" in diameter. The fact that it would polish to such a smooth finish suggested it might engrave well and so I went through a few sketchbooks and pulled out an idea I'd been thinking about since last year. I transferred the drawing to the block and started cutting.

This wood proved to be not suited to engraving after all and in my hands the end result is crude and rough.  The wood cut cleanly enough for simple lines but clearing or re-cutting tore and shredded the wood and real detail was impossible so I'm glad I purposely chose a simple, childlike image to engrave.

 My mask-like face turned into a puppet as I was carving and last-year's doodle became unexpectedly topical with the election circus going on in the news and the no-longer-hidden way that big business, oil and the pharmaceutical and agribusiness giants (and now the Russian government) seem to be controlling the people we elect to represent and protect the people.   I added the sets of eyes the background and the "King Puppet" became "The Puppet King".

"The Puppet King", wood engraving. 

I'm happy with how this came out. It's been almost a year since my last engraving and I needed the practice. Plus after meeting with a local engraver and making a few new acquisitions that I'll reveal shortly,  I'm really excited about my next one-- and this time on REAL wood and proper tools.