Woodblock Wednesday - "begin afresh"

New year, new term of woodblock printing at Morley starts next week ... something new is needed.  One possibility was to outright steal an image from somewhere, and this not only looked appealing but would have been "interesting" to make into a woodblock print -

But I want to use "my own stuff". So I looked through various A4-sized sketchbooks for possibilities... either for direct use, or to spark an idea...

After thought and discussion I narrowed it down to four, including one from an exhibition seen yesterday - Leo Villareal at Pace Gallery - or rather a photo obtained from consecutive blowups from a photo taken there -

The rejects

The group of pots are from the first gallery visited on the first day of Lucinda Oestreicher's "East End gallery visits" course; the pots were made by Nicola Tassie, and the year was 2014. The drawing needed a bit of tweaking -

 The tracing paper starts to show differences from the original -

And after about a million tweaks, quite a few differences - removals, shifts in position, and tiny rearrangements -

Haven't figured out how many blocks are needed, but they'll definitely fit on this nice bit of shina ply -

It'll be a day or two before I can start carving. Better to let it lie for a while and have a fresh look ... but I do want it to be ready to go, rather than need reworking!

Like my own pots, which I see as personalities that relate to each other in mysterious ways (just like people do!), these drawn pots are stand-ins for some of the strange relationships we encounter in everyday life. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it, much as people do with their pets?

The plan is to have an outline and think about adding colour later - rather like an earlier project, not yet finished...

The "Korean dolls", carved in August,
still awaiting a satisfactory print
(these are coloured-in rubbings)