Woodblock Wednesday - carving water

With the first panel cut (it's to be printed pale), work starts and finishes on the  areas that are to be printed dark -

The middle panel was the problem - which areas to print and hence which to cut away -

 Pretty much done -

Coincidentally, the dress I've been wearing lately

 The first prints -

Just the first panel
First and second panels
All three

The other panels printed separately...

 Layered up, closer up -

The colour change confuses the print, and the imperfect printing doesn't help! But these are early stages, I need to sort out what's going on ... and what I actually want it to be like. The starting point was quite different, quite colourful, but the idea is to either carve another panel of "colourful glints" or add tiny areas of colour from the back.

A different kind of water - rain on a window - against the light, and close up -

The houses across the street are captured at various angles in each drop of water

Different again...

Drawing Tuesday - Natural History Museum

With a possible woodblock project in mind, I went in search of the Moon Rock. It turns out that this is the only piece of moon rock owned by the UK - these plaques containing moon rocks were presented by President Nixon after the final manned moon mission in 1972 (Apollo 17) as a gesture of goodwill to 135 countries.

 So, on to more earthly matters - crystal structures in rocks -

 After so much looking, all that went into my book was a quick drawing of a huge specimen of tourmaline -

The faceted items are totally conjectural ... sort of "imagining the moon rock"...

But the museum has more than rocks. Jo found Guy the Gorilla, who had arrived at London Zoo in 1947 and died of a heart attack in 1978 -

The second drawing is a sort of injunction to "never give up on your materials" - in this case, an intermittent felt pen.

Sue found a huge flatworm, and a West African sand dollar -

 Judith caught the spectacular view of the great hall, with the suspended whale and the shifting crowds -

 ... then went somewhere quieter and found some African animals -

Due to constraints of space, Carol's Megatherium skeleton need some lower-limb truncation - but not much! -

 Joyce got involved in the coloration of fluorite -

 Janet K risked a crick neck from looking up at the suspended dolphins -

Extracurricular activities -

An Urban Sketchers meeting at Trinitiy Buoy Wharf gave Joyce a chance to draw these -

 Tools du jour -

Judith's bendy-tip fountain pen

Joyce's soluble crayons

Jo's vivid pens, with acrylic ink

And finally ... last week Carol found herself the only one at the Wallace Collection (the others were at the Wellcome Collection, how confusing is that similarity of names!) and took the opportunity to study some footwear, and the Laughing Cavalier -

Woodblock Wednesday - two strands

In class, some simple printing with layers of colours...

What worked best was laying the "inked" circles on the paper template, and matching the edges of the pages (from a Japanese romantic novel).

More can be done with these...

You get so busy churning them out, you don't stop to carefully consider what to do next. That comes from the review a few days later!

I always enjoyseeing the colours in the palette change during cleanup, and the mixture of colours in the sink -

Those of us who took part in Morley's Print Exchange brought in our items, for an exhibition -

 Meanwhile at home I'm working on "the water project" which was sparked ["sparked"? water? - not quite right...] by the photo of the Portuguese Atlantic on the left and the dull old Thames on the right -

I spent an inordinate amount of time find good sections of each to work with, and manipulating them in photoshop so they would print out usefully on the black&white printer -

It was a surprise to see the coloured flecks appear as the photos were enlarged. Artefacts of digital photography? Or, things that the unaided eye doesn't see? Or even - microplastics in the water?

This was my first series of tracings, but really the long format (1:4) was what I wanted. Not a complete waste of time - it gives practice in separating tones and a feel for "the shapes of water" -

 I tried painting the sparkling water with thick and then thin acrylic paint -

It sorta works? No, not quite enough! ... back to the photoshop version ...

 A few to chose from ... sleep on it ....

 Then trace again -

 And then retrace it over carbon paper! Then finally the cutting can start. This little bit took nearly an hour, to the accompaniment of several episodes of a "Book of the Week" (BBC) abridgement of the life of fashion designer Elsa Schiaperelli -

The dark areas are where I started to treat the surface with nori, to try to hold the delicate small pieces on better. Hmm, we'll see if that helps at all with the cutting, and then maybe do the rest. It's dark because I mixed the nori with my unfinished coffee - not a secret formula, just too lazy to take the 15 steps to the kitchen to get plain, clean water!