Road Work Wednesday

Okay, this is not the section I was driving through today, but you get the idea.
This image is from farther downriver, in the Royal Gorge. In July. I didn't
have a camera with me today.

Never fear, there's still time to leave a comment on Monday's post and be entered in the celebratory giveaway. But we do not rest on our laurels here at Brush and Baren. There is work to be done, by golly.

First on the list was to return a piece of equipment to a friend in Colorado Springs. It's a long way to drive (2 hours each way) just to return something, so my original plan included time to draw at the zoo there.

Plan A: Make the trip last Friday. But last Thursday the weather forecasters were all predicting snowpocalypse, so I decided it could wait. In the end we got diddly squat for snow between here and the Springs. Denver (another hour beyond) got almost 2 feet.

No problem. I had Plan B: Make the trip Monday. No precipitation in the forecast for the entire week. Perfect.

So why, when I woke up Monday morning, was the ground completely white and the sky filled with snowflakes? What the....!@#?!?! (Grumble grumble grumble.)

By yesterday morning we had probably six inches of the white stuff on the ground here, and there was snow in the forecast again for tonight, but DANG it, I had to make this run. So off I went this morning, fingers crossed for good roads.

Aside from a few icy spots in the canyon and some thin fog and wet roads on the Front Range, the journey was uneventful and even completely snow-free in areas. Still, I didn't feel right about dilly-dallying when travel has been so unpredictable, so instead of going to the zoo, I opted to turn right around for home and make some stops in the canyon along the way.

"The canyon" is Bighorn Sheep Canyon, through which flows the Arkansas River. It's a popular stretch for whitewater rafting, and if Christo's proposed "Over the River" project gets approved it will also be the site of that installation. Most of my trips through the canyon are just that: through the canyon en route to somewhere else. It was nice to take my time today and enjoy the view.

Celebrations Everywhere!

Somehow, without fanfare and without any particular attention on my part, Brush and Baren made it to five years of publication (in December) and 700 posts (today!). A lot has happened since December 2006: I shifted house (twice), shifted my studio (twice with the house and recently out and back), added a Darling Man to the household, traveled to both US coasts and stumbled along local paths. My work and the blog have evolved and continue to do so. It's been, as they say, a great ride.

Right about the time Brush and Baren was quietly turning five, Katherine Tyrrell at Marking a Mark was quietly tallying votes for her annual Making a Mark Awards. Among her many insightful categories is "Getting Out of the Studio," honoring artists whose work involves, well, getting out of the studio!

Within this category is the Going Greener Gong, awarded to the art blog deemed "most stimulating in relation to getting us in touch with nature and the environment." Roll a drum and bang that gong, Brush and Baren took the prize! To show my delight and blushing appreciation, I get to sport this lovely little badge all year long. I thought about having it embroidered on the lapels of all my jackets, but in the blogosphere no one can see you dressed. I'll stick with the badge.

Thank you, Katherine! And if you haven't ever visited Making a Mark, I encourage you to do so. Long among the top-rated art blogs originating in the UK, Katherine provides myriad resources and inspiration for artists and art-lovers around the globe.

A blogoversary, an award, and a postiversary all in the first 5 weeks of the new year? It's the blog equivalent of the rockstar lifestyle. Look... I even have to deal with paparazzi!

Oh wait, that's just the sun glaring through my window. Nevermind.

It's customary to make speeches when one wins awards or achieves significant milestones, (I'd like to thank the Academy....) but my list of thank yous is so long that we'd be here until the next awards season. Top of the list, of course, are Brush and Baren's readers, commenters, lurkers, cheering sections, and obligatory-laughers-at-bad-jokes. Hey... that's YOU! Thank you.

Since February is the month for celebrating those we care about in addition to celebrating blog achievements, it seems like it's time for a giveaway! The first year we were together I made this little linocut as a valentine for David, and he has generously agreed to let me share it with the big, wide world.

It's not a new sentiment, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Naturally I didn't get things together in time to give us a big headstart on Valentine's Day (now just a week and a half away)... so here's the deal. Leave a comment on this post until midnight Thursday, February 9. I'll assign the comments a number in the order they are made and then use an online randomizer to pick a winner on Friday. If you're in the US, it might get to you by the 14th. But, hey... who wants to only celebrate the people they care about one day a year? After Valentine's Day is good, too.

I printed several of these in a variety of colors... you can see them in my Etsy store, Rio Salida Art. Where, as blog readers, you get the extra-special whammy of a coupon code good for 20% off anything in the shop through the end of the month! Just use the code THANKS20 at checkout. 'Cause you all are my valentines. Really. I've got a big, green gong to prove it.

UPDATE: It appears that Blogger might not be accepting comments in a timely manner today. We're also without cell service here in the Heart of the Rockies, so perhaps that solar flare is flaring. And the moon is almost full. Whatever. Don't despair if you can't comment. Try again later!

Studio Redux

Well.

You may recall that back in September I delightedly moved my printmaking operations to an out-of-house, dedicated studio. I really enjoyed having a space to go to that was entirely about making prints, but there were some less than ideal aspects to the situation. The first was that to get to Studio V required navigation of a long (26 steps and 2 landings) stairway, which meant I couldn't get things like my flat files up to the work space. (Presszilla* was out of the question.) Most of my reference books and sketchbooks and my drawing table also stayed home (where I continued to work on illustration projects)... so "poking around" developing new prints couldn't really happen at Studio V. I had to arrive at the studio with a plan, and once the plan was accomplished, head back home again. Finished prints had to be carried home to store... Not so efficient.

There were other details that weren't working out, either (let's just say the building didn't have the right vibe), so in the end I decided to bring everything back to the home studio. The challenge was to figure out how to integrate the new door-turned-workbench into the old space! After much headscratching and some judicious rearranging space was made and last week the workbench and Elvis came back home.

Things are pretty cramped in here, but I'm delighted to discover that the time spent working elsewhere help me develop a new system for working here. The priorities for this space have changed... An 80-inch-long workbench demands that the bulk of the room is now focused on printmaking, but there's still just enough space for illustration and design and the administrative tasks that have to be done here. I'd still like to have a dedicated studio that's not in the house, but it needs to be the right space. The greatest thing about the last few months in Studio V is that I learned more about what the right space should be.

I've already done some printing here, tweaking the space as I go. You can see in the image above that there's something big happening, but I'm not ready to share it just yet. I did pull a number of just-for-fun prints that I'll post later this week... There's a little celebration about to happen!

(*Presszilla still isn't here, but I think we've worked out a plan for her that will benefit more than just me. Details as they become available.)

Another tool for the Plan B arsenal

During the process of working a reduction block I frequently make "mistakes" that cause me to rethink my next steps for carving and printing. Most are small and they're either not critical or they're solvable through subsequent ink passes. Every once in a while, though, I make a mistake on the LAST pass... and that takes a bit more headscratching.

A few days ago I printed what I expected would be my second-to-last color on this autumn landscape linocut. I wanted a little more interest in the middle-ground dark trees than just a flat color, so I thought a few highlights would do the trick.

So far, so good.

But for some reason I just couldn't wrap my head around how to make the sort of marks I wanted for the highlights, so when I started printing the final color it just looked too spotty and busy. The marks were too similar to those in the background.

Okay, I thought. I'll just join some shapes together and vary them more and it will be fine. So I carved some more and printed again.

Ick.

These shapes seemed overbearing, and rather than bring dimension to the trees, they seemed to flatten out. What the heck?

And then I realized what the problem was. The trunk of the second-from-left tree had been cut out at the wrong step... and the background green was showing through the middle of the tree instead of the highlight color. Damn.

There are ways to fix these things. It's possible, for example, to "pounce" color over an area with a brush and stencil (a technique called pochoir)... but I'm not experienced with pochoir, and the idea of having to do that over an obvious area in the entire edition with unknown results was not appealing.

This looked like a job for wood filler.

I've never used wood filler to repair a block, so this also seemed a bit risky, but I figured I could always carve it back out again if it didn't work and try something else.

Who knew there were so many kinds of wood filler? I stood in front of the shelf at our local hardware store for a longer period of time than I expected, and finally settled on this small tube of Elmer's brand "Carpenter's Wood Filler." I applied several "mooshings" of filler in the cracks... each time it dried it shrank (shrunk?) a little.

Then I sanded it smooth. The patch still seemed a bit shallow at this point, but I am not a patient person so I decided to go ahead and print anyway. I did recarve one spot that had gotten filled in during my overzealous application of goo.

Well, whaddaya know? It worked. Probably would have worked better if I had applied filler one more time-- I had to rub a little harder on the patched spots to get good ink transfer because they were just a skosh lower than the rest of the block surface-- but in general it worked out just fine. It's not a technique I intend to employ on a regular basis, but it's good to have in the arsenal of back-up plans.

Fieldwork Frogday. With penguins. And cabbage.

Trips out of "our" valley seem to happen in clusters. I might not get more than a few blocks beyond the house for weeks at a time, and then suddenly I feel as though I'm hardly ever home. Last week I accompanied the DM to his gig in Manitou Springs for the first time since September or October, and this week I tagged along again for two more days of gigs in the same area. I expect to make the trip again in a couple of weeks...

You would be right in thinking I have plenty of opportunities to listen to David play here at home, but those opportunities aren't typically within a 30-minute drive of tigers and gorillas and lizards, and I've been really jonesin' to draw more critters lately.

So while we were down in the city (again) I tucked my sketchbook under my arm and toddled off to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo (again), where I drew bullfrogs and penguins (again). The bullfrogs and penguins (and hippos and komodo dragons) are housed in the same building, and I usually end up there because it's a facility with decent light and workable vantage points from which to draw. I admit it: Some days I like my "field"work with a dash of comfort.

The advantage to being in the building on this particular day was that we got to watch the hippos enjoy an afternoon snack. By which I mean a keeper placed an entire (large) head of cabbage in each open hippo mouth. Kerrr-UNCH! Who knew that cabbage could make such a satisfying noise?

This morning we're home again and I got back to work on the landscape linocut. The second-to-last color went down just fine and then... oops. Problems.

Stay tuned for the resolution, but until then I wish everyone a week like cabbage in a hippo's mouth: Something to really sink your teeth into.

And a little bit more...

There are plenty of days, or even moments throughout days, when I question my efforts as a printmaker. Maybe I should be pursuing some other career...

But then I put a blended roll of blue and green inks on a block and doubt just melts away. Seriously. Would someone who wasn't a printmaker feel a chill up their spine when confronted with this? I kinda doubt it.

Autumn landscape linocut progress

Printing continues to be slow in the new year, although I now have two larger linocuts mounted and drawn and ready to start carving. A batch of "white" Awagami Kozo arrived two days ago and yesterday I trimmed it down to size for the 12 x 18-inch block that's next in the queue. I'm excited to start it, but also a little bit nervous.

In the meantime, I've been working in fits and starts on this small landscape. The last time you saw it it had just the blue sky and tiny violet hillside in place, but a fair amount has happened since then. Naturally I kept forgetting to take the camera to the studio, so two steps are undocumented. So far it's gone like this:

1) Blue (stenciled)
2) Violet (stenciled)
3) Transparent yellow (no photo)
4) Deeper yellow (still no photo)

5) Green-to-ochre blend (above)

6) Deeper ochre on only the lower half (lousy photo).

This edition is being printed on the "natural" color Awagami Kozo, and I'm trying to maintain only moderate pressure on the baren as I print each color. This means the texture of the paper is a little more pronounced, but I'm hoping it also means the colors will remain more luminous. Fingers crossed. Well, not really. It's too difficult to carve and print that way.

Linotype: the film

Sometimes you just need a little film about "obsolete" printing technology to get your day off to a great start.


"Linotype: The Film" Official Trailer from Linotype: The Film on Vimeo.

One more example of how I was born several decades too late. I did typesetting on another now-obsolete machine, but it wasn't nearly as fun as a Linotype.

So far the screening schedule for this film seems confined to the coasts. Seriously? That can't be right.