Adventures in Printmaking

One of my favorite new adventures this year has been taking a printmaking class at USD. A lot of people look confused when I say that I'm taking a class called "Printmaking" and they think that it is photography or silk-screening or marketing or something. So let me explain...photography (etc) is a form of printmaking, but before photography was invented, people made prints with other, less technological means. Basically, before photography, people engraved an image into a medium (wood, metal, etc...) and then used that material to transfer the image onto paper like a stamp. That is what I'm doing.

For reference, this is how people circulated images in publications before the mid 1800's when photography was invented. In the 1600's and 1700's Renaissance and Baroque artists such as Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt used this method to create art. See below some of my favorites. The technique of printmaking (specifically woodblock printing) is also an ancient Japanese tradition that only began to influence European art in the later part of the 19th century.

Utagawa Hiroshige
A Cool Summer Evening at Ryogoku

 

 

 

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Trees (1643)

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                   

So basically, what I'm doing is an extremely old and AWESOME art technique. In our class we are using wood, copper and zinc. You basically carve (in the case of wood) or scratch (in the case of metal) a drawing into the surface of a woodblock or zinc or copper plate. Then you use the plate to print that image onto paper. The actual process of printing the image is it's own beast, but I won't get into that. Here is my first attempt at a woodblock print--from preliminary sketch to final product.

So first is a drawing I did of the a little golden Buddha statue that my mom gave me a long time ago for luck. Then I retraced the drawing in ink to get an idea of what the final print would look like in sharp contrast. Then I transferred the image to the woodblock, carved the wood out around the black lines (to create white space), then I applied ink to the block and laboriously printed it onto paper. The whole process took me 2 weeks.

I'm currently working on a bigger wood print for my next project and I also have a copper drypoint in progress (whole different animal). The whole print-making thing is incredibly labor-intensive, but oh-so satisfying. I spent three and a half hours carving my current block on Monday night and I got so involved in the process I didn't even realize that my fingers, arm and shoulder were almost numb.