House Reveal

New print, Veiled House, and its block

Here is the first print from the block you last saw in this post.

A sunny, fall day with screaming oranges and reds and a clear blue sky. A white house that looks purple on its shadowed face. Grass still alive and green. 

Of course, it is time for summer thoughts now, not autumn ones. The next planned block is summery. Water, lobster buoys, trees... Just wait and see.

Teasers

Two white-line woodcuts in progress

You will have to wait a bit more to see the print with the house in it.

Because I have found even more white-line woodcuts already in progress!

I have no idea why they aren't finished, but I am excited to finish ALL of them!

Under Construction

Block, print in progress and inspiration

Remember this block from two weeks ago?

I have printed quite a bit of it and here is a picture of it in progress. By the end  of printing, the leaves should be bright oranges and reds and golds and the house a bright white with one wall in shadow. 

I also hope that the tree trunks uphold the structure of the whole composition.

We shall see next week!

More Revisiting

Bright Day, jigsaw relief print

Next week, there will be a new white-line woodcut to show you, but the block you saw last week still needs a bit more carving.

In 2013, I wrote a post about the making of this print. It amused me to read it again recently, so I thought I would share it with you.

There is also a video of me printing one of these, so you can see how complicated it was.

"This print is a jigsaw AND a white-line. I completed it a few weeks ago from drawings in my sketchbook. 

I don't know how many pieces I ended up with after I cut up the block - you can try to count them if you want to. But there isn't a prize for the right answer or anything. This time.

Something exciting happened while I was making this print. Aside from getting this cool image, I had a little revelation.

My mother is a crazily avid knitter (I swear this is relevant), but she doesn't like to do small projects with lots of little ends to tie in at the finish. I got her the book Knit Your Own Royal Wedding a few years ago as a Mother's Day gift and she certainly laughed as she looked through it, but I knew she wouldn't actually knit any of the projects. "These characters are full of little fussy bits," she told me. 

I used to think I was the same way - not interested in "little fussy bits". But now I am not so sure.

This block seems like a messy, logistical nightmare to print - there are a lot of pieces and some of them are small enough to worry that they might end up lost down the drain during clean up - but I really loved every minute I was making it. Even snuggling the tiny pieces together when they were covered with ink and one tiny slip of a finger meant pulling it apart and re-inking.

This was created in one layer, just like a traditional white-line woodcut. So I didn't have to worry about registering the paper on the block properly over and over again. 

Basically, all is going well."

If you are interested in adding this print to your collection, they are still available.

And this image is also in the Wave Collection of note cards.