Wait! Where have I been?

Happy September everyone! I hope you all enjoyed a two (three?) month break from me. This summer, I decided to be more present with my family and so I signed up for fewer markets and made fewer prints. I have a rather large collection of ideas I want to work on.

The other day on instagram, I asked what people would like to read in my newsletter. My bestie, Fede, said I should discuss my creative process and, well, the best way is probably this picture. I’m going to discuss my thought process throughout making my latest piece in this newsletter- I do include pictures so if you want to just look at some pictures you can scroll through and get an idea of what I did to get to my finished piece.

Sometimes, I will make a print from a half-baked idea and a doodle. Other times, I am researching like crazy so every bit can be as accurate as I can manage, I’m making thumbnails and studies and I scroll through pinterest getting ideas for hours.

My latest print, the coneflowers, is a result of taking a picture in the garden center of a Meijer, deciding that I wanted to make a print with flowers to prepare for a larger print with flowers, preparing a whole lot only for me to realize that I was doing that out of being nervous and being unable to just make a print and then just delving into it and hoping it goes well.

My inspiration for the style comes from Matt Underwood who makes multiblock prints using wood blocks and acrylic paint.

I also take inspiration from Gustave Baumann a German born printmaker and painter who spent much of his time in Indiana and the American southwest making beautiful landscapes.

I guess I like the idea of shapes of color combing to make one cohesive image. That’s also why I like RISO so much, but I’m so bad at technology that I haven’t gotten into that because it’s digital work.

I chose coneflowers above all others because they are native to my state Ohio, they come in beautiful colors, and have a great amount of texture- I mean look at how soft and delicate those petals are compared to the spiky disk florets.

Now that I have an image I have to think about what I’m going to do with it- I chose tracing over trying to redraw the scene.

Next, what size? Will this be a big piece? will it be rectangular or square? I chose to go with a smaller 4”×4” size partly because I already had 4”x6” blocks I could use, but also I liked the idea of a smaller scene filled with flowers and foliage in a tiny packet. I cropped the original image so it could be a square and added it to a word document so I could adjust the size to 4”x4”.

My plan was to make multiple layers of separate colors to bring the image together. So I tried my best to observe the piece and pick out what colors I could use. In the end I chose: yellow, light green, blue, pink, dark green. But what’s also nice about this being a multiblock process is that I can also play with the colors once I start printing. But also how do I successfully transfer this image and it’s colors onto the blocks?

I could use my laptop, but that thing tends to time out. So I guess I’ll just use a window.

Now, so often people tend to discuss how they can’t be artists because of all the equipment they’ll need and that is true usually at some , but you don’t really need a ton of fancy items to get the job done. So far I have used my camera on my phone, I used my computer’s (free, came with the computer) editor to make the picture square and then I used google docs to make sure the picture is 4”x4” and printed out the picture on regular printer paper. The fanciest stuff I have used so far is tracing paper and washi tape which could be replaced with parchment paper and any tape that can be moved around easily like painters’ tape.

Once I have all the squares for the separate colors, I transfer the images to blocks and color in what will be the relief image and get to carving. I definitely make a lot of mistakes during the transferring process because sometimes I just had no idea what I was telling myself lol

I made my test print and realized that I really didn’t like the colors that I had and so I had to buy new ink pads. I chose ink pads for this layering piece because I think the ink already gives off a nice translucent look that layers nicely. Bonus: it dries instantly and so you can work quickly.

And then once I got my new paper and ink I went crazy! I made a registration for this so the blocks and paper will always lay in the same place and I won't have to worry too much about colors shifting too much while printing. I actually don’t have any pictures from this process because I was too far into the zone, but I did cut a 4×4” hole out of a cardboard box for slime that I got for my niece and added Ternes and Burton registration pins, drew an 8×8” box around the hole and that’s where the inked blocks would lay as I laid the paper down for printing.

Overall, I’m actually pretty proud how these turned out because they are close to the idea I had and I can play around with the print.

I know I started off with “here’s my creative process” to “here’s just how you make a print”, but not everyone who reads this is a printmaker and so they don’t know the steps it takes. Also, I hope you guys got to see that it also doesn’t take a lot of fancy tools to make art. Use what you can and experiment! All you can do is learn from what is hard or you don’t like.

I will be working on a restock at Funny Farm Coffee Co and Main Street Shop and Studio that includes these prints and greeting cards. If you wish to purchase a coneflower print of your own, you can contact me directly and we can go over what I have and what you want. They cost $35 not including shipping ($5 us domestic) or we can do a local pick up.

Thanks so much for getting to the end. It’s now 10:06am on September 1st and this goes out in 2 hours! I hope it is coherent and educational lol byeeeeeeeee

Until next month ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Kaitlin : )