Thursday, November 17, 2011

Things to do whilst waiting for ink to dry


In the ongoing list of things to do whilst waiting to proceed with prints in progress*:

# 12) Package up one's contribution to the Monumental Collaborative Puzzle Print project so that tomorrow one can
# 13) Take it to the post office.

All the gory details for Maria Arango's demonstration of insanity printmaker prowess can be found on the MCPP website and blog. The short version is that Maria cut several large sheets of cherry plywood into small, odd-shaped pieces and sent one to each of the more than 100 participating printmakers. We send our carved blocks back to her, she reassembles the puzzle and prints copies for each of us.

The project theme is "City of the World." I'm pretty sure that my block fits "behind" a house-shaped piece and "in front" of a skyscraper-shaped piece.. which made me think of an alleyway. Cities large and small have all sorts of creatures (also large and small) frequenting their alleys, especially at night.

Who-who-who goes there?

I had never carved cherry before, and I have to say I quite liked it. There are a couple of spots on this block where the carving went too deep... blame it on poorly sharpened tools and brief lapses of attention on the part of the carver. I just hope it prints okay... we're not to do test prints for risk of warping the blocks before they are returned to their mothership. Ummm, motherboard. Ummm, proper place in the puzzle.

(*What? You didn't see list items #1-11? Let's just say some things are best kept to oneself. Like laundry. And dishes. And whining.)

4 comments:

  1. Oops! Erm...make that OOPS!!
    On my monitor, in my post prandial state...I saw a dinky lil ol' row-boat.
    Then I read on...about critters in alleys...
    Oops!(But I still think it looks like a row-boat.;-) )

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  2. I went through a phase of using cherry only. My god that wood can cause horrible blisters, it's so much harder than other woods - and of course the phase coincided with an art-making phase of tiny detail that required many many many man-hours of carving. After a particularly excruciating block, I swore off cherry and haven't yet gone back (though someday....)

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  3. saw that it was an owl right away, but i guess from the side it could be a row-boat :p

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  4. A boat? Geez. I'll bet you all could do those "magic eye" things when they were popular, too.

    Marissa... this was cherry plywood, not solid cherry, so maybe that was the difference? The veneer layer was pretty thin and nice to carve.. very little grain to deal with. Well.. the block was pretty small, too, so not too long to carve.

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