Artist. Slacker (sort of).

(SPOILER ALERT - if you want my xmas card to be a surprise, don't look)

I ran out of time and energy yesterday and the result was that I had no drawing to post. I did do something creative however. I printed the first color for this year's 4-color lino-cut xmas cards. This year, I've gotten more ambitious than in years past in several ways:

• At my husband Jim's insistence, I've come up with a registration mechanism that uses an old set of registration tabs and Post-It paper flags. We've put two hole-punched tabs on every card and now all we have to do is pray it works - because registration has always been the most difficult (read: next-to-impossible) part of the printing process because I kept thinking we could do it by just lining up the edges of the cards on the printing plate.
• I'll be attempting to represent many more than four colors in this year's four-color print. The most colors I've ever printed on my cards is four, but usually, I break the image down into four distinct colors and it consequently ends up all a bit cartoony. This year, I'm going to attempt to make realistic gradations of color using my linoleum carving skills. Yeah, I'm not expecting this to go perfectly.
• And, obviously, from the previous bullet, I'm going to attempt much more realism in this year's card.
• I'm planning on printing two colors in a not-recommended order: light over dark

Three and a half hours of last night were spent printing color number one. The first color always takes longest because the inking area of the plate is the largest, and rolling them takes much longer. It took even more time than it should have when I started fretting that I totally screwed up the initial registration. The pleasant surprise was that the first color - a slightly red-shifted light blue - turned out very good with the [mindlessly-chosen-yellow-shifted-off-white] paper color.

I'm not expecting miracles with the rest of the card, because of what I'm attempting in bullet number four above: printing two lighter colors over the darkest color. Using samples of printed color from old cards, I tried mixing the two lighter colors and layering them over a darker one, and it looks like it will work. But, execution is always the hardest part of printing. 

In theory, everything works, right?

Anyway, here's a teaser of the print process (yes, that's light blue, not gray, stupid phone cam):

Custom Greeting Cards -The Finished Product

With training and work I've not had time to post a blog about the finished greeting cards that I made for auction - but I have a moment before my long bike ride today to show you how they turned out.

The printing process went quite smoothly. I only had to print 5 of each card and they were all one color, so all I needed was an inking plate, black (oil-based Speedball) block printing ink, and a small 2.5 inch soft rubber brayer (Speedball). The inking plate is a cheap marble slab that I bought years ago at Home Depot in the tile area. You could just as simply use a pane of glass, it just has to be a non-porous flat surface:

I created a template out of a scrap piece of paper/newsprint with pencil lines drawn on it for lining up the block along two adjacent edges so that I have the correct margin. The block is placed with its edge on the pencil lines and the paper is placed to line up along the same two adjacent edges of the template border itself. The only tricky part of this step is to make sure that the card will fold with the image on the correct side. Here are some shots of how I line everything up:



And finally, I run it through my small etching press, with its roller adjusted to the height of the block with the paper on it. I do a dry run - a non-inked plate with paper on top - to adjust the height of the roller. You want pressure to offset the ink onto the paper, but not so much pressure to get ink to spread outside the lines or to damage the linoleum block:

You can see the finished cards in the first photo at the top of the page. I started the bidding at $5, in $1 minium increments and by day 2, the bidding was up to $12. Don't know how much they sold for, but I got requests by workshop attendees to do another edition of cards.

An Easy-week Art Project

This week is an easy training week which gave me time to work on an art project that needs to be done by 29 April.

Every year since 1994, I've made Christmas cards using either linoleum block printing or screenprinting. Until 2007, I did all the production by hand which was extremely time consuming and labor intensive. In 2007, I purchased a small etching press from Dick Blick to finally streamline the process! (much to the dismay of my right arm, which looked forward to the pain and muscle-building process every holiday season).

This year, I'm using the press to print my first set of cards for non-Christmas purposes and I wanted to blog about the process for everyone who asks me how I do it. The cards are a set of five animals, to be auctioned as a fundraiser for the Madagascar Fauna Group in conjunction with Cleveland Metroparks Zoo's 2009 Prosimian Husbandry Workshop. The prints are one-color (black), so there won't be any discussion about registering multiple colors.

I start with a photograph manipulated in Photoshop for size/color. I print it out at the proper size (the card image this time will be 1/4 the size of a 8.5x11 in slice of paper - so 4.25x5.5 and there will be five, two landscape, three portrait). Then I gather the necessities: music (most important - carving and printing MUST be done to good music!), linoleum block (I use Dick Blick's golden lino sheets, they're easier to cut than battleship gray linoleum and they don't seem to harden over time), lino cutters (speedball makes a set of 5 cutters with handles) and carbon paper to offset the image to the block:



The next step is to offset the image onto the paper and start carving. I usually start with the most interesting and intricate area, so if I screw up the carving, I can start over without too much time lost. For animals, this translates into: start with the face.

Here is the progression described above:

In my next blog I'll show the five finished blocks and the printing process. Now I have to go buy paper. My favorite paper for printing cards is called Stonehenge and it comes in several neutral colors. It's heavy 100% cotton acid-free paper and I can tear it to any size. I don't use the already cut and deckled-edge card stock, mainly because I want the finished piece to be a frame-able piece of fine art disguised as a greeting card.