Monday, June 27, 2011

365 Day 178

another material in printmaking class

Tonight in relief printmaking class at Art & Ideas, Shaqe gave us a new material to try. It is called Blick Wonder-cut. She also had us choose another of our sketch book drawings.

I went in all excited about that super hero drawing from a few days ago. Shaqe liked it but guided me back farther into my sketch book. Good thing she did, too.

We found this page. I was looking at the page as three or four separate characters/drawings. Shaqe helped me see that the three figures could work together as a piece. They also are closer to the earlier carvings I have done in class. This will all get pulled together later as we put our series together. Hmmm...sounds cool.

So this Wonder-cut stuff...I am not terribly fond of it. It has a surface texture to it to begin with. It also smells a little like cork...and acts a little like cork. It is a little bit spongy to cut. You put your blade into it and when you pull it back the material kind of closes up a bit. Hard to describe. Also, my outline lines are waaaaay wider than with the other materials. Both the softer E-Z-cut and the harder Blick Golden-cut tend to give you the line that you carve. This Wonder-cut material is very different.

I am very glad to have the opportunity to try out so many different carving materials. I know now that I like the Soft-cut gray for some things and I like the Golden-cut for others. I know you have to be more careful with the storing of the Soft-cut because the surface can get scratched and marred. The Golden-cut gives you a more hard surface for your block. The Wonder-cut is probably good for something that I haven't figured out yet. This class is really great!

Also tonight -- I delivered my completed bear-ish guy print, matted and framed, for the upcoming all ages student show. I am very excited about this show. The age range of the artists is 5-70 years -- how cool is that! You will have to wait to see the photos from the show...opening is July 9. I will post more about it as the date gets closer...and plenty of photos from the show.




we traced a detail from a drawing in our sketch book














then we played with variations of it













then we chose the one we liked and transferred the image to the Golden-cut block...you can sort of see the surface texture in this photo...kinda sorta tiny like bumps, sort of grainy but not...the material doesn't really crumble or anything













I have carved the outlines in this photo and taken out a little bit for white areas...you can see how much wider my outlines are...the material doesn't really want to be cut a whole lot closer...it is cork-like and soft-ish...you put your blade in and when you pull it out the line expands (or something)...hard to describe

it's not a bad thing, I just don't care too much for it in comparison to the other materials











a test print of the carving...this is actually the second print after I tweaked the first version...I'm not done with this yet and perhaps I will get used to inking the surface...I know I want to give it a background of some sort...I had an idea on the way home

2 comments:

Kim Vanlandingham said...

Thanks for sharing how all of that works. I've not had to do any of this in school yet. It seems terribly difficult!

Took said...

It is pretty easy, really. You just need a steady hand to do the carving.

My hardest part is with the printing and getting a dark, rich black.

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