Just a quick one from me. I don't seem to be doing very well at this blog malarkey but never mind. Whilst you were away, here's what you missed;
Success at the Autumn Fayre! People met, prints sold, money made, fun had.
Grand day out to the Saatchi and Tate Gallery in London. *featuring a cheeky little selfie of me and mate, well why not aye!*
A journey in wood engraving for my Art GCSE project "Ordinary and Extraordinary" for which I got an A* to anyone remotely interested.
And if that wasn't enough, I had my TEN HOUR GCSE mock exam on the theme "Order and Disorder" *This piece was an A1 illustration of Alice in Wonderland which got me a lovely full marks!*
And finally, an addition to The Printshed. Brand new from Hawthorn Printmakers in York. I could talk for hours about it but I'll cut to the chase - it's my pride and joy.
So that's what you missed. Hopefully I'll be posting again soon but for now I better get back to work!
Right, yet again procrastination has gotten the better of me and I have not posted in some time *I bow my head in shame, I really do* but here I am with a lot to talk about most important of which - my sixteenth birthday ahem. I received some lovely, grand spanking new printing gear to play with so when I have the time I will write a tutorial on making prints if you´re interested! Anyway, something also that is important is that I have printed my newest wood engraving! For anyone who doesn´t know what one of those are, its a very detailed form of relief printmaking that involves patiently carving into a block of wood to create an image. I designed this print during August whilst on holiday:
Then over a period of four/five weeks, on a piece of Lemonwood, kindly donated to me from Chris Daunt, I carved my design bit by bit. Of course I got to that stage, part way through, where I thought "Why did I even start this", I am renowned for making things difficult but I managed to force my way through. Here´s a little feed, a journey if you like, from beginning to end *excuse the bad photo quality*
I was able to proof the print on some Japanese Kozo to see how it printed before printing the edition.
Now printing: - Whilst designing this print, I bumped into Geri Waddington on Twitter, Geri is an amazing wood engraver... you should seriously look her up and admire her fantastic work!! She is the secretary and soon to become the chairman of The Society of Wood Engravers... I know right!...Impressive.
Anyway, Geri kindly offered me the chance to go visit her and use her relief press to print the edition. She showed me the two mighty fine presses she owns and got me to use all sorts of papers to print on - you´ll be surprised at how much of a difference it makes. Here are some photos I took through out the day:
Geri also handed me some lovely endgrains of what turned out to be Boxwood!! I handed them over to my dad who resurfaced them to a fine polish. I´m sure that I will use them soon... thank you Geri for such a productive day!!
So here we have.... "Bedtime", an edition of 25 printed on quality Arches 88. This will be available from my Etsy store in the next few days. It will also be available, along with all my other prints at the Stour Valley Community School Autumn Fayre next Friday 14th. I will be there carving my next print so come and visit!
So I've been busy building up my stock of prints in the hopes of setting up my Etsy store again. Prints such as the wood engraving "Home Sweet Home" have been doing really well (if I do say so myself) so make sure you get your hands on one before they run out! Anyway the print "Cock Pheasant" has just this second come out and is now available from both myself AND the Hare's Tail in Clare (for more information, visit my Facebook Page) so I thought it would be constructive to give you guys something you absolutely, definitely, uncontrollably desire - a little walk-through of the experience...see knew you'd be pleased ;)
It took me a while, as it sometimes does, to develop a design that I was happy with. It's funny how sometimes I can sketch something so quickly and be really pleased with it and then other times I can spend ages trying to find a design that is satisfying. Anyhow...once that was done, I painted it up in full with some watercolour and then transferred the design to a block of Plywood and carved it into what would eventually become this, the blue block.
Matching colours can be a pain, especially when you're trying to minimize waste, luckily, on this occasion I knew exactly what I needed to do to achieve the best colours. Rolling a thin layer of ink is easy enough but being able to ensure an even layer on the block isn't. It took me multiple attempts to get a clean print but once I had the knack it didn't take me too long to print the edition.
Once all the blue was printed, I carved the red block from a sheet of lino, carving away all the areas I didn't want to print.
Now...this print was made around the two weeks I went on holiday so the blue had a huge drying time! However this only made printing the next colour easier.
I used my book press to print these guys, the press weighs a tonne and it sure does require a little elbow grease to work it! "Cock Pheasant" is an edition of 25 prints, all numbered, named and signed ;) If you have any questions then please comment below and I will try to answer them as soon as possible. Of course you can head over to my Facebook page and contact me there if you'd prefer! For now I'll leave you with a little snap shot of the next print "Midnight Stroll" that will be coming out hopefully next week *fingers crossed*. There is a short video of the making of this print over on my YouTube account, so head on over and take a look!
So as it's been a whole year since we last saw each other (my doesn't time fly) I thought it would be well worth the while to give a little more detail on some of my favourite parts of the year - one of which is my first GCSE Art final pieces.
During the first half term of school we were given the project of "Structures - 2D"; for these we were assigned the task of choosing a structure - man made or natural - and develop it into a final piece. For this piece I chose "Marine Life" which I thought was quite neat since there was an infinite number of possibilities that could be used.
Over the next few weeks I needed to record, develop, experiment and present my ideas and all the while I had to witter on about the significance of every single element - easy marks but a little tedious to be honest. However, it was nice to admire other artist's work in a number of artist studies for which I chose the lovely Celia Hart (www.purplepoddedpeas.blogspot.co.uk) and amazing Fiona Humphrey (www.inkyprintsintheattic.blogspot.co.uk). Their work is such an inspiration and I could look at in admiration them for hours. Honestly...go have a look on their Facebook pages (Fiona Humphrey's is called Inkyprints Originals).
So over the term I came up with a design which I used in a mini final piece as a to-scale watercolour that would save me time later when it came to mapping out the print. Now I had been having some problems with registering the prints, being that the block didn't match up due to inaccurate drawing of the design; so I chose to design it on the computer and then transfer the image from there - far more reliable and less frustrating but a little time consuming for my liking though it had to be done.
Once these had been transferred using matte medium and toner I was ready to do the fun bit. So over the Christmas holidays I carved each of the blocks out ready to be printed on the schools press when I got back. I had to ensure that I didn't miss cut anything as trying to fix mistakes - although not impossible - is a little fiddly.
.
These are two of the three blocks I carved. When I got back I spent a few days testing inks and colours before I printed them just to see how they looked overlapping. Of course this being a school I wasn't able to take a picture of the printing process (but fear not a post on this subject will arise at some point) but I do have one of the final piece. I was quite happy with the end results and for a first timer I don't think I did too badly, not perfect but just something to talk about when it comes to evaluating it, ehhh.
And so there you have it, a little and very opinionated insert to my first EVER final piece. As always I enjoyed writing it and hope you enjoyed reading it just as much.
I'll be off now to sort out what will be my next post...in the meantime feel free to check out my Facebook Page and Instagram. If you have any questions then don't hesitate to comment below and I'll do my best to answer them.
So I've just created a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/willbakerillustrator for the facebookies among you) and all is going great. I've had many likes which makes me jump up with excitement every time I see someone new has entered my midst and a fair few people are interested in what I'm doing. Of course I advertise new posts on Twitter and Facebook so people can read these little insights of my life and many people have come up to me in the past few days and informed me that they've read my blog and thought it was funny. Many people have said they'll comment and haven't "ahem" but don't you worry, I'm patient and the likes on my page are a brilliant substitute.
Anyway this post isn't focusing on my Facebook page, brilliant as it is no, this post is kinda focused on unicorns and printing. You may be wondering why unicorns, well I'll explain. Today someone came up to me and said they had read my blog...are you with me so far...good, so anyhow they also said that it would be more interesting if I involved unicorns so here you go L.W. here's your unicorns.
This is an amazing video I have watch countless times made by the also amazing SecretAgentBob. So now that I've got the unicorns out of the way I can start on what's really important.
I have just started my D of E (Duke of Edinburgh award) and in my skills section I chose "Relief Printing" as I enjoy it and admire the work of printers more than any of the other art forms. Doing this has given me a reason to explore different forms of relief printing, one of which is linocut. This requires you carving a corky material called linoleum with a range of different sized knives, U and V tools to create a raised surface that will pick up the ink and transfer it to paper. I will describe the process of producing the block now and the inking stage later.
For this I first mapped out my design in pencil on the lino block to give me a guideline as to where I should and shouldn't carve.
This is of one of my chicken which had been scratching around in the daffodils last weekend and I always thought of April has having daffodils so there's the link.
Next I started to carve and so I have to be serious here and inform you of the risks - knives are sharp - there's my safety reminder so I may continue. I carefully cut the design so that what is left is what will print. I do this by using the V tool to mark out the edges and clearing the smallest of spaces while I use the U tool to clear away the large spaces. I push the tools away from me and at the same angle to slice off a clean strip. If you apply different amounts of pressure to the tool it will go deeper into the lino and consequently the slice will become wider. I do this until my design is the only surface raised from the cleared areas.
And this is what you get as well as this:
A load of sliced lino but you don't need to worry about that as long as you remove it before you start to print you know, just to stop it from ruining everything.
Okay so that's all I've got for you in this post but there should be a new one on soon so in the meantime, feel free to comment, I look forward hearing from you.
