shina plywood

Back to the forest

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Now that Floating (to the left!) is done, it’s time to get back to what I was working on before. My idea was for a path through trees, dappled with light, with sunbeams filtering through the leaves. I wasn’t sure how to accomplish the sunbeams, so in a sense, the work on Floating let me test out an idea. I think it turned out as I expected, so It’s given me the courage to move ahead!

I haven’t posted this snapshot yet because it’s really sloppy, but this is about as far as I got with test printing. Mainly the aim was to test out some colors to see what works. I will probably make some more test prints; I think the bluish green is too blue, and I have since removed the hard line between the ground and the background foliage from the key block, hoping to make that a mistier transition.

It seems like a pretty complicated project so far. Here’s the stack of blocks; one is empty on the back so that’s 9 faces, and I think the test prints have about 15 impressions looking back on my notes.

I’ll give a sense of sunbeams by overlaying shadows that intersect and darken.

Originally, I thought the shadow blocks would be really straighforward, without much detail, and had planned to carve them on shina plywood. However, after making the transfer sheets and seeing the size and shape of some of the areas that need to be preserved, it’s pretty obvious they need to go on cherry. So, today I will make one more block! Because that one little bit of shadow on the upper left goes all the way to the top, neither one will fit on the blank face I’ve got — it’s a tiny bit too short.

Temporary diversion

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Here’s the latest block set, hot off the carving bench!

It’s a bit of a departure. No key block, and carved on shina! I’m working on a quick print on A4 paper, for the Awagami International Miniature Print Exhibition. The print needs to be in Japan by July 31, and given how unpredictable mail can be these days, I think I need to allow a month for shipping. There’s NO WAY I can have the complicated Forest Rays print done, and besides, it won’t fit on A4. Hence, a temporary diversion.

Shina is quick to carve, and I had a ton of it laying around so I didn’t have to make new blocks. But shina has definite downsides. I’ve had the top ply come off of thin lines before. This piece was part of a fairly large area, so I am surprised it peeled off. I’m just glad I noticed, and saved the piece! I’ll be able to glue it down when the wood is dry.

Re-boot of an old bird

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A couple of years back I started work on a print of this sly character relaxing in a lake, perhaps thinking about his next snack. I made a few test prints and didn’t go any further because they just weren’t turning out well.

This was the first print I made where I used the hanshita method to transfer a print’s lines in order to carve color blocks. In this method, the key block is printed on transfer sheets made by laminating a thin sheet of paper, usually gampi, to stronger paper with removable spray adhesive. This post shows some prepared transfer sheets for a different print, which are then glued face down onto the clean color-blocks-to-be using the same registration marks that will be used for printing later. The stronger paper is peeled off, then the surface layers of the gampi are peeled off to yield a clearly visible guide showing what needs to be carved. After carving, the rest of the paper is washed off, and voila — the color block is ready to print.

In a dumb, rookie mistake I used the wood glue in my drawer – Titebond III – to affix the transfer sheets to the blocks. Oops! Titebond III is “proven waterproof” and “offers superior bond strength” – really not characteristics suited to my task! As a result, I couldn’t ever completely get it off the surface of the color blocks, and they basically refused to hold and transfer pigment evenly. That’s why the blue is so patchy and uneven.

I still have a bunch of shina plywood that I don’t see myself using for a new project anytime soon, so I think I will carve some new color blocks for this print. I’ll use the original key block.

It needs a bit of cleanup. I carved it back when I was using u-gouges and v-gouges, so the valleys are really rough. Some of the lines could use refining.

Another thing I did was to introduce some discontinuities in the lines of the hills that are supposed to be reflected in the water. I am hopeful that these will help the reflections look more like reflections. These changes on the key block mean the location of the gaps will be transferred to the new color blocks, so those blocks can have aligned openings that produce white lines in the finished print.

I don’t envision doing a huge run of this design, but I would like to do it justice with some well-executed prints!