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

Snakes, Knives and a Spaceship...

It's Been a while since I've blogged...so here's a little update on the projects I've begun for the new year and a few hold over's from last year...

YEAR OF PRINT EXCHANGE

Year of the Snake inked plate waiting to be printed.

My snake went out a year late.  I had the plate carved for a year but other projects kept popping up and delaying its printing...so I printed it up with my Horses...

PRINTMAKING TOOLS

Back in the November of 2013 I blogged some under-paintings I started while volunteering as a Teaching Assistant for Mick Sheldon's Color Theory Class. Below are the finished acrylic and digital paintings.

 Baran

 Blue Digital Gouge

 Brayer

 Etching Needle

 Green Digital Gouge

 Maru Bake

 Orange Digital Gouge

 Twisted Needle

 Violet Gouge

Vintage Brayer

I'm currently carving plates to make 10x10" woodcut prints of six of the above images.  Once I've printed the editions I'm planning on cancelling the plates by doing encaustic paintings on top of them.

BARENFORUM.ORG PRINT EXCHANGE NO. 60

Here's a sketch for the woodcut print I'm about to start carving for a print exchange with fellow printmaker members of the www.barenforum.org group.

It's inspired by a passage I read in the book Agents of Ki by Anna Erishkigal. The book hasn't been formally published yet but you can purchase the previous books The Chosen One and Prince of Tyre in the Sword of the Gods series at Amazon.  They're available as printed and e-book versions.

What I've Been Up To...

This semester I've been volunteering in a color theory class as a teaching assistant for Mick Sheldon at American River College. Painted a lot of charts in the very cool workbook Mick created for the class.  That's because he want me to do the class work as well as help out.  Mostly I try to pay attention to what he's doing when he demo's technique so I can observe good color theory teaching techniques.  Now I'm working on the last class project where we create 10 paintings of objects using the color theory learned in class to solve specific problems.   The first thing I did was to do 7 sketched underpaintings.  I used Conte and charcoal then used a brush and water to blend it.  I only did 7 sketches because we're allowed to do 3 of the illustration in the computer so I took some photos to play with Warholizing...  Below are the 7 sketches. Later I'll post the Warholized photos.