Onto the third block now. This one will take the longest to carve as the lightest grey is in most areas of the print and underlies the other two colors. I start in the upper left slowly working my way down the block taking care not to loosen any of the more delicate pieces of carved wood.
More carving this time on the right side. I'm mostly using an Exacto knife with a fine sharp blade to do the shaping of each area, then a thin v-gouge to remove the wood around the carved areas. Larger areas are taken out with a wider c-gouge and a flat chisel.
Here the block is mostly completed - it has taken quite some time to get to this point. Mainly because I am new to woodblock carving and also because I am taking care not to break off any of the small carved shapes of the somewhat delicate wood.
Knowing that I could lose some of the carved areas when printing, I decide to carefully add thin superglue to most of the smaller shapes on the block reinforcing the glue of the plywood. I pour out a blob of glue then using a thin piece of wire, add glue around the base of each carved shape. This of course takes ages but I am at last satisfied that the wood won't come off of the block later on when I start the print run.
And here is the block with the image washed off and the wood dried. As you can see, there is a lot of detail on this one - trust me to choose such an intricate image for my first woodblock print!
And here is the 4th block in the series. This one was the simplest as it will only be used for printing the blue of the eyes.
Finally I'm finished with all the carving! It really has taken some time but here are the four blocks shown together. So far I'm happy with how things have gone. Next onto to some test printing!
1 comment:
Looking forward to the test prints, this has been very educational for me so far !
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