I’m very happy to have been selected by the kind folks at PrintAustin to participate this year in PrintExpo! Normally PrintExpo is an in-person affair held in a large hall where printmakers and printing collectives set up booths to show their work over a weekend, including an evening gala with adult beverages and the like. This year of course we can’t do that, so it’s going virtual. There will be a virtual conference on February 6, 2021, with more details to come about registration and content.

In conjunction with PrintExpo, I am working on a video demonstrating most of the steps in producing a print. I started recording content a few days ago! Here’s one setup:

The phone makes pretty decent video, including audio that is clear without too much background noise and hiss. Watching myself on video shows me just how slowly I speak and how infrequently the words come out when I am thinking about something! Unfortunately I’m showing steps that aren’t reversible, so I can’t just do another take. I hope I’m able to edit the clips into a form that won’t drive viewers mad 😉

The video demo will start with making the blocks themselves from parts. This will be a pretty large print, the largest I have made using cherry blocks yet. The blocks are about 8″ x 10″. I used 1/4″ American Black Cherry thin lumber laminated to 1/2″ birch plywood with waterproof wood glue, then I used scrapers to get the surface of each block into shape.