Woodblock Wednesday

Next term's woodblock course starts on 17 January and till then I'm trying to use Weds mornings for it. Today I was looking forward to cutting and printing "something simple" - perhaps overlapping squares, what could be more simple than that? - so as to experiment with layering colour.

But ... having sent off some Winter Solstice greetings, I got deflected into the simple shapes of the curved earth and the curved sun, and when it came to arranging them on the blocks there seemed to be a dazzling array of possibilities. So I played around some more, hoping that manually handling the shapes would help resolve the confusion. (Though a little inner voice keeps saying, "just do it, it's no big deal, you can improve it next time!" Go away, tedious little inner voice - I want to be satisfied with the outcome!)

It's true what they say: when you can't decide what to do, just start. The plate was to hand, so I used it to draw an arc, and then the next one, overlapping; and then related that to the bits of wood on hand, and then redrew it the actual size of the wood, and that started the thinking about how much overlap there might be, and does the image need flipping ... so out came the origami paper and some arcs were cut from that (much easier to play around with composition) -

 Seeing the two blocks, I leapt ahead to "this could be a folded book with the shapes moving past each other as it goes on" ... which led to other decisions about composition, relative sizes, sequence....

 What sort of curve is the "sun"s trajectory... does it completely disappear ...

 Er, wait a minute - this is supposed to be about overlapping colours, let's get back to that idea, save the book for another time.[Could it be a tunnel book ...? how would that work with the size of the shapes? ....]

Now, which way round should it print? (Keep It Simple, says the little inner voice, then decisively shuts the window.)

Something to let the subsconscious resolve, when it goes walking with me. On return, cutting will happen, aiming to print tomorrow...

A positive result of the morning's dithering is the finding some papers that will be useful for another project, which has a fast-approaching deadline -