Another Print in the "Printmaking Tools" Series

This is a photo of the next print in progress.  This is the printing plate carved into 10x10 inch plywood.  The image is of a Maru Bake, a brush used in the Japanese Hanga technique of printmaking.

The first edition of prints from this plate will be on 7.5x10 inch paper for a BarenForum.org print exchange.  I will, of course, print only a portion of the plate and I will be printing it using the Japanese Hanga technique.

This is what I estimate the print will look something like...probably a little lighter.  I fiddled with the contrast, color and brightness in the above cropped photo of the printing plate.  I haven't printed it yet...I'm still carving.

This is an underpainting of an 8.5 x 11 inch acrylic painting on water color paper.  I did this painting a year ago while interning in Mick Sheldon's color theory class at American River College.  I wrote about the project in this blog post: 

http://phare-camp.blogspot.com/2013/11/what-ive-been-up-to.html

This is the finished painting.

I so enjoyed making those painting of the tools I love to use that I decided to do a series of printmaking tools.  I'll do 6 woodcuts of tools based on the sketches I did for the color theory studies.

I then plan on using the carved plates as substrates to make encaustic paintings of the tools.  Who knows...if I haven't gotten sick of the project after that I may go on to make giant paintings of the images...

Last year I did a moka hanga woodcut of a baren...a tool used to burnish the paper during the printing process.  I wrote about it in the following blog post:

http://phare-camp.blogspot.com/2014/04/barenforem-exchange-60-prints.html