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.....

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.