The only tool I have is a hammer and ALL of my problems look like nails....

If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 

 

This was an etegami that never was. I had the idea to do a postcard of an old hammer and the text was already there, the 60's-era quote from the psychologist Abraham Maslow that "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". But I never did the sumi postcard, since I had rapidly sketched an imaginary hammer, and liked how it came out, so modified it to use as a sample print for a workshop demo. The simple line drawing was easy to turn into 4 separate plates and to show how to transfer the image and to demonstrate carving.

But that was in NOVEMBER, and with just 4 blocks, and rather straightforward colors, this print should have been done in just a few days. But times are strange, and between Covid lockdowns, waves of infection that kept me out of the studio, the need to take care of garden/outdoor projects or to assist with family matters meant that the prints got started, then stashed in the freezer multiple times. A small loss of line in a key block I wasn't sure I was going to use needed a repair, and further work was delayed by the Winter and New Year Holidays. But I finished one set of proofs, shown above. You can see very pronounced goma-zuri (speckling) that I think was due to me using either too strong a size (too much alum) or mistakenly sizing the same sheet twice....the background block should have printed the shina grain. But I like how this came out.

The top photo is a proof I finished today. It was printed on Awagami heavyweight kozo, a machine-made paper to which I've added additional sizing--there is another set, on natural-color kozo that I hope to finish early next week and on which I want to try the original idea--a version without a keyblock, using just the overlapping color plates to create defining borders to separate the shapes and forms. Either way, and despite starting this in November, this is my First Print of 2022.....

More Whales/Ancora le Balene.

I printed a small run of the 3-block whale prints on good paper but I can't say I'm thrilled.
I didn't keep to my test prints and the colors wandered way too far afield (offshore?) towards the turquoise and teals and there's too much variability within the small number of prints I made.
I never did get to use Block #4--I had hoped to print a white spray with gofun; white crushed powder ground from seashells to mimic the foam and spray of the whale's breath but even on the beige and off-white papers, the dark sea and sky makes the paper already seem "white".
Tomorrow after they're dry I'll cull the rejects of weak or too strong colored ones and see what I'm left with.
In addition to this batch, there's another 20 copies of the simpler one block/2-color version I may try to have another go at the color version to get closer to my original vision.
These were all small samples of the Okoume' plywood I got recently and cut down to use as a grain-printing block for my workshops. This print was a "test" to make sure these blocks were easy to carve and print from.

Block 4 that didn't get used.

Year of the Monkey: My Mandrill is finished.

Here is the finished print and a variant.
With 60 copies in the stack, each color took about 2 hours to print--the simple color shapes went a little faster while those with two colors on the same block took longer.

I've also included below how each block printed alone in the sequence in which the print was put together.

Sumi keyblock. Lots of paste on the boxwood made for very visible brushstrokes.

A pretty hot-pink nose and face mask . Some viewers found this image provocative.

Cobalt Teal and a little Ultramarine Blue with enough paste to make it very transparent.

A Naples/Hansa Yellow Bokashi to the Mane

A "mix-colors-until-you-get-a-brown-you-like" Brown.

Transparent Sumi Batman mask and Hansa Yellow

Phthalo Blue and lots of paste--Bokashi graded printing.

   
The last color, this blue bokashi to the Mandrill's mask, really made all the difference.

Suddenly, the mask and face really pops and gets an emphasis that it didn't have before.
I used the same block for the background, the blue bokashi overprinting the yellow to make a green.
But after 5 copies, I decided there were already enough colors and left that corner alone so most of the prints have a yellow "sky".
(It is the year of the FIRE monkey, and the original plan, scrapped for the same reason, was to overprint to make a sunset orange....).

I think I signed 50 prints today after trimming the paper and writing the titles.
A few are already gone and another 35 are destined for the BAREN Forum's Chinese Zodiac Exchange participants. I think that means that after a few more go to family, and a couple of loyal supporters and another handful of regular collectors that I won't have enough to go around.....and so I'm probably not finished with this thing after all.