Continued from [River in Winter - 2] | Starting point of the thread is [River in Winter - 1]

Nearly a week since the previous update on the carving process ... It hasn't been a full seven days of carving though; I took a day off with Sadako, wrote the winter issue of the newsletter, sent out a bunch of media flyers for the upcoming exhibition, did a bit of year-end cleanup, and ... spent a day downtown on miscellaneous things, including a live interview on NHK national radio ...

I've now got the blocks finished for the large rock in the bottom left corner, and for the foamy area at top left. Three pieces of wood ... two sides each. Here they are on the bench ...

And let's zoom in a bit, to see what some of those 'dots' look like:

Actually, there will still be a bit more work on these blocks, but I can't do it until after some test printing. You can see in this image that the 'dots' are all produced from quite sharp cuts. This wouldn't look very natural in the finished print, so I'll be taking a knife to them and knocking off a bunch of the sharp points, and roughening up many of the edges. But it's better to wait and see what the overall appearance is, before messing around with them too much at this point ...

The shape of the foam is going to come from this karazuri ('empty printing') embossing block. I followed the same general kind of shapes that I can see in photos of the whitewater; when later combined with the colour tone blocks in varied shades of light blue, I think it should look ... interesting!

And here's a closeup ... (click for enlargement)

Next job in line will be the six faces that will cover the flowing water part of the image ...

The thread continues in [River in Winter - 4] ...

Posted by Dave Bull at 9:35 PM | Comments (1)

Continued from [River in Winter - 1]

Lots of carving done the past couple of days ... It always takes a bit of time to get back in the groove again; unlike 'real' carvers who do nothing but this every day, I lose a lot of my touch for this job during the weeks of printing and other work ...

I'm trying something a bit different for parts of this print. When I was involved with the production of the Aspen Grove print for Mokuhankan last year, I was quite intrigued by the set of blocks that Mike created for it. He used Photoshop to break a photographic image into tone levels, and then used a computer-controlled tool to cut the resulting patterns onto a set of woodblocks, like this:

Now, I'm not interested in making a print that looks just like a photograph, nor having it cut by a machine, but I thought this idea of tonal breakdown was something worth playing with, so I took a photograph of the stone in this design and broke it down into levels. Mike used eight levels for his photograph of that grove of trees, but I just used four for this stone. I also did the same thing for the zone of splashing foam, and then put the Photoshop output onto a set of four sheets of thin paper to see if they looked 'carveable'. Here's one of them ...

Whoo-hee! Look at all those little black dots! What do you think?

Well, those of you who checked in at the Woodblock Webcam earlier today know what my decision was!

And here ... after pretty much a full day of work at it, is the block that matches that image. (The stone and the foam will of course be printed in different colors; they simply share the same piece of wood because there is enough distance between them ...)

So one down, three to go! (But I do have to admit that more than once during this endless - and kind of 'mindless' - process, I've asked myself "Is spending so much time sitting at my bench cutting tiny little dots really a sensible way to use so much of my precious time on this planet?)

The thread continues in [River in Winter - 3] ...

Posted by Dave Bull at 10:24 PM | Comments (7)

Time for work on the next chapter of the My Solitudes series to get under way; this one will be the 'River in Winter'.

The design for this one may come as a bit of a surprise to some people; I have learned from correspondence during the past few months, that many people seem to have the idea that there are only to be three designs in this series, with the same landscapes appearing in different seasons. Now that's not a bad idea for an intellectual and design challenge, but I felt that for a multi-year project like this, the collectors (and I) need a bit more varied 'content'. So there will be 12 very different designs overall.

We saw a very peaceful corner of the river back in summer. Let's look at another aspect of it this time:

Now this isn't a photo of my actual camping spot - this was taken a short distance upstream. But it does serve to give another view of what this river looks like ... a very steep valley and a rough landscape. I'm standing at least four meters above the water, and look at that trash caught up in the tree branches on the right! This is not a place you want to be after a major storm comes through!

The previous river print was a mid-range landscape design; but this time I want to move in for a close-up, so I scouted all around my camp area for an interesting 'still life' of rock and water. When you get down at the water's edge, it's quite a jumble of white water and rapids. Here's a typical view ... surely it should be possible to find something interesting in all that!

After a few hours of poking around at the water's edge, and getting my feet plenty wet jumping and slipping around on the rocks, I came across this little scene:

Rock ... smooth water ... white water ... and a good bit of 'energy' as the water slides down that little 'chute'. I think there might be an interesting print 'hiding' here ...

I took some snapshots, and then returned to my desk, and started to fool around, trying to frame it in the best way to catch the dynamism of the moving water. I think I managed to come up with something, but it's going to be difficult to show you ... yet.

The previous three prints in this series all had pretty understandable 'key' blocks. There was one block - printed in dark pigment - that carried lines that formed the boundaries of the different colour areas of the print. This image will be different. There will be no key block as such.

During the time that I am carving, there will be no way for you to 'see' pieces of the puzzle coming together. The blocks - for the most part - are just going to seem like random shapes and patterns. But once they are all done, and a multi-layer printing is done from them, I'm hoping we'll have an interesting print!

Anyway, for what it's worth, here's the only one of the blocks that will have any lines at all, so let's call this the 'key' block:

I think you can recognize the stone in the lower left corner; as for the rest ... well, stay tuned!

The thread continues in [River in Winter - 2] ...

Posted by Dave Bull at 8:00 PM | Comments (7)