A print of monumental proportions

Those are the DM's feet at the far end of the City of the World.
I made him stand there for scale.

If you were reading Brush and Baren last autumn, you might recall a post about my participation in the City of the World project.

City of the World is the brainchild of printmaker and certifiable crazy woman Maria Arango Diener– the third of her Monumental Collaborative Puzzle Print projects.

Monumental? You can say that again.

Maria cut 5 large sheets of cherry plywood into over 100 small pieces and sent them off to printmakers around the globe. Each of us carved our respective block and sent it back to Maria who, with the help of a few friends, reassembled and printed the resulting massive piece. More precisely, they printed FIVE large pieces for each and everyone who participated. 600 prints. Amazing.

My City prints arrived in Saturday's post... and here they are taking up most of the living room floor today. Maria's got all the gory details, and even some video of the print party on the MCPP blog. Do pop over and check it out...

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.)