A delightfully printmaking-filled weekend

… is what I’ve just had. On Saturday I went on a wood engraving course at Red Hot Press, the print workshop I’m a member of, and jolly good it was too. Jutta gave us an excellent exercise to start us off and get us to use different tools to make a variety of marks. We had to divide the block in half and using a leaf as our basic form, engrave one half of the block black on white and the other half white on black. Not as easy as it sounds!

I was working on a block about 3cm by 1.5cm, the smallest I’ve ever done so that was a challenge in itself. Not particularly taken with the result but it was a really useful and fun day.

Yesterday I spent most of the day in my own studio working on the sisters-in-law. They’re barely a week old but showing signs of aging already…

Back to wood engraving

Portraiture is my thing. Most of my prints have people in them, usually in a portraity way, so I thought I’d continue along those lines for my initial wood engravings. The ones I’ve made so far seem rather too ‘white line-ish’; not something I’m hugely keen on. Hence my next experiment which was an attempt to achieve a more ‘black line’ appearance.

Having drawn the image on the block, I cut both sides of the lines to leave a black line in the middle. At this stage, I proofed it to see what the lines would look like (see right); an interesting image itself.

After that, I continued to cut away until something that looked reasonable emerged (see below left). I think one is supposed to plan the images more carefully – I tend to just get the outline down, then cut in an instinctive way, making it up as I go along. I don’t think that’s how it’s meant to be done...