Tuesday, April 28, 2009

1 down, 1 to go

This is the first time I've ever drawn and pasted a subsequent phase of a reduction block and it was met with limited success. After drawing on one of yesterday's prints with a black sharpie, I copied the black areas onto a piece of tissue paper. Mine is always wrinkled and folded from being used in giftbags & boxes but it seems to work just the same. Then I coated the wood block with gum arabic and tried to paste my tissue paper on the block. Big mess. I had a really hard time getting the image to line up.

I think some of this is because the paper stretches during printing, it's (the paper) wet when I pull the prints, and a few other factors which cause the printed image to differ somewhat in size from the carved image. I knew going in to it that it would be impossible to get an exact match.

Still, it was harder than I had thought. I think there was something else going on that made it very difficult for me. Who knows, maybe just 'user error' - there could be a reason why I've never done it before: maybe no one recommends doing it. Later tonight I'll post my issues on baren forum to get their feedback on what went wrong.

Not all wrong, though as there is now a piece of paper containing the black areas of the image pasted onto my block. I'm not sure how it will all look when I carve it much less what's going to happen when I try printing but I guess we'll see soon!

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