Now For Something Completely Different

I should be writing. I'm on a roll, things are flowing, good guys are suffering, demons are demoning... but I also have a print to get out. Luckily, I can divide my evening between carving the print and writing. Oh, and editing a poem. Sleep is overrated anyhow.

Since this is The Year Of The Boar, I am doing a printmaking exchange through the Baren Forum. The theme? Year Of The Boar. I've done Year of the Dog (2006) and Year of the Horse (2002).

The idea is to make a bunch of little postcards on the theme, and mail them off to other printmakers around the world who sign up for the exchange. After playing with different ideas, I ended up with a Roman Boar from a mosaic that I liked.

First step was to sketch what I wanted.


I did some clean up in Painter, dropping out the gray tones and increasing contrast, then printed out the sketch to use as a basis for carving my lino block. Someday I will get braver and delve back into Moku Hanga, but not this print. I'm comfortable with lino blocks and like the graphic representation they produce.

Next, I did a color sketch to see how I wanted the final print to look.
Depending on the inks I have, I can approximate the colors. Not sure about the purple, but I'll figure something out.



I carved out the first part of the boar. I decided to do a color reduction print - no guts, no glory. This means I will work from light to dark on the print, overlaying colors as I go, and carving away the things I want to stay the previous color. I need to make 65 prints, so a reduction print may be stupid on my part, but I want to give it a shot. In the first block, I carved away everything I want to remain white or the paper color. The boar is facing backwards, when I print him, he'll turn around the way I want him to face. For a spatial dyslexic, printmaking can be nervewracking at times - backwards is correct and letters get carved in reverse. Hence the layout before hand. Saves me a lot of miscarved blocks.










Next time: Paper, First color prints, block two.