Camping Block Prints

I did some gentlemanly camping with my brother and some friends this past week in Bear Mountain State park. It was a fantastic time: good people, creatively cooked food, no service, lots of fire, liquor, singing, and for me, drawing. Upon returning home, I took it upon myself to make a series of block prints from a drawing I had made of my brother studying. The memories fresh in my mind, making a wood block print of this drawing took me back to the campsite, a relaxed frame of mind, and the wonderful conversations and times that were had this past week.

Here is the drawing:

I roughly reversed the drawing on tracing paper because I wanted it to be the right way around on the prints. I carved it into a pine board and tried to pay attention to the various directional repetitions in the drawing and vary them in sections. I thought a strength of the drawing was that it divided up well into segments that locked together.

The prints came out fairly quickly. Some came out crisp, some came out thin, some came out bloody, and depending on the sequential colors, some came out either vibrating or piling up on top of each other. The variations and combinations was quite exciting to make.

Below is the set of twelve prints.I used acrylic paint to make them. The last four I made over an abstract ink drawing which I divided up into four pieces and printed on. I thought of the other three as I was printing each one in particular and tried to make them relate. 

Here's the set of the last four stitched together.

Woodblock Printing, Continued

For the next set of woodblock prints, I started with a sketch I had made some time ago of my two little brothers sitting at the table.

I used the reverse side of the board I had used to carve the other block print for this one. I carved out some negative spaces, making texture and depth decisions partly intuitively, partly thinking about how it would look when reversed and printed.

The great thing about this type of printing is the guided loss of control. I have a certain amount control over the carved  image, but not in the same way I have control over a drawing. Then, once I begin printing, I have little control over how exact the image plays out. I have a general control over how thick I put the ink or paint on the block print, but once I pull the paper off the block, I am always pleasantly surprised by how the print turned out. It's a nice dynamic between specific, static marks carved into wood, and a complete dependence on how materials react when mushed together. It's a nice study in letting go, and letting the materials do the work for me. Also I still get to make color decisions, with a similar attitude. Here are the full set of sixteen woodblock prints, all around 5"x7", acrylic or ink on 140lb. watercolor paper:

Woodblock Printing

I've been doing some woodcarving this summer (on commission), and from that got inspired to carve out a board and do a woodblock on my own time, which I got quite carried away with. So I took the board out to the garden and brought out a drawing of mine to work from as well, and made a woodblock carving. I find there's a great energy in gardens, a lot of vitality, and it's a peaceful place to get in a relaxed state of mind. I find the amount of different patterns among different vegetation a challenge to piece together and sort out or abbreviate in a drawing or painting. I have been reading a book on Matisse and it mentions his affinity for and interest in patterns. So with that in mind, I made a set of twelve woodblock prints on various types of paper with acrylic paint and ink. The colored paper is from a set of grainy charcoal papers, and the bright white paper is 140lb watercolor paper. I experimented with combining the colors, layering them on top of each other, and getting different effects with the amount of medium and the residual medium on top of the different papers. I'm a fairly inexperienced print-maker, but it certainly made me think about color in a different way, laying it down all at once and relinquishing control. Here's a few of the results in no particular order. Enjoy.