One Way

A little temporary diversion.
I've been threatening for years to do a series of prints based on my favorite Italian road signs inspired by my forced attendance at Italian driving school. (There's an oxymoron for you). ((Forced due to residency requirements not any traffic infringements)).

Two small blocks of Beech (Faggio). These are leftover cuts of one of my beetle blocks and are about 4"x 9" in size.
A little too short to faithfully represent the actual road sign this is inspired by.
While not actually one of my favorite signs it will do as a test print.
I wanted to see if my locally-sourced, Japanese paper (unsized) would work--it didn't.
And whether I could get a decent opaque white printed on tan paper....fair but not convincing. I'll need to do multiple impressions to get the deep blue and the opaque sparkly white I want. Third, it will give me a chance to print with mica powder now that I found a local source of mica today (the ever-helpful folks at Zecchi Fine Arts) so I can now forge ahead once I finish cleaning up the blocks.

Not worth showing the results this round as the blocks are still more interesting than the prints.
Need to clean out the hollow areas--they seemed deeper before washing off my hanshita/drawing paper.

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.