Olansa Cuttings

Over the last few years I’ve taken a shine to the early European woodcuts shown in books about medieval travellers, merchants and technology. The other evening I had the idea of mixing these images: ships, cranes, towers, and so on, with a rather dull still life I was sketching at the time. Easier said than done. So I started out with this: one ship, one cup, planning and cutting in about half an hour. The haste shows, of course. But I might carry this on and do something a bit larger and better executed. I think a few bowls and cups with ships, a busy port city, and the odd mad mendicant or two, might do the trick. More as and when I get anything done.

And many thanks to Bareners who gave advice on how to get a denser result print from ply. This one used my nipping press and a sandwich of heavy MDF board plus a little soft backing cardboard to even things out. Getting there…

Last week I finally decided to cut a wood block. OK, a small piece of shina. The design was based on a close-up photo of a beetle that somehow ended up on the net curtains of my office last summer. I sketched out a design and left a thick border to about 6″x8″.

Cutting shina was quite a change after playing ‘hunt the knife mark’ with lino. I could see (more or less) how the design was coming along. To make life a little harder I decided to cut all the outlines with a knife rather than gouges. This lasted until the shaded part of the abdomen when I caved in and used a small v-gouge to finish off.

So far, so good. Things went to pieces a little come the printing. I used some fairly heavy, toothed drawing paper for proofing, plus some Lawrence ‘GB’ oil-based washable ink, burnishing using a spoon on some prints and a Speedball baren on others. Humbug. The ink had a couple of hard bits which you can see on the first proof. That wasn’t what bothered me, however. The grain showed everywhere and I couldn’t seem to get any solid blacks even using the spoon.

Time to ask the astounding Baren Forum people for advice… They recommended all sorts of things including burnishing out from the centre, trying thinner Japanese paper, dampening the paper, and so on. The local art store and stationers were out of blotting paper so I’m stuck with dry paper prints until the delivery gets here. Japanese paper I had.

This evening I tried a few more proofs on the Japanese paper (no idea what type — the label fell off!) and had a little more luck. Most of the black solids were just that, except the lousy border! I don’t know. It’s probably my slapdash inking and burnishing, but it’s worse than ever — every little tool-mark caught the ink and printed fuzzily, and the border was patchy as hell.

I’d like to put this through a cylinder press (will shina take the strain?) just to see what might be possible. That’ll have to wait for another day. In the meantime I’ll try another block and start all over again. While keeping on eye on course listings or trying to find some one-on-one coaching from a real printmaker!

Until next time…