Peace Swap

 I signed up to do a swap with Peace as the theme with the Carving Consortium. I did a carving a few weekends ago, but when I went to stamp it on the cards I had a very strong reaction that she was turned the wrong direction. When the pages are bound together, she would be facing the binding.

I really didn't like that, so I carved another stamp. Unfortunately, things were getting down to the wire. I needed my pages to arrive by September 1!  I've been swamped with work and family and didn't have a chance to do anything during the day, so one night I stayed up and worked on a new carve. I didn't realize until I did the test print that I had carved out her back!

I tried to carve a plug and glue it in, but that didn't work well. Finally, I just carved a new, smaller stamp that I could use to fill in the gap. That seemed to work okay.

I decided to spice up the background with a spiral stamp and Versamark ink. Here's the final look:

Throwback Thursday: Game of Life

This was another project I found while cleaning up: an old Eyes Open Now workshop. The original description for the workshop was "Using old game sets, collage and paint, we will explore representing our lives in game form. Will you use your game to represent events in your past or will you use it to map your spiritual journey? Are the playing pieces aspects of yourself or other “players” in your life? Perhaps you’ll want to explore what rules are in your personal game of life. How you want to play is entirely up to you!"

Mine is an altered Monopoly for kids game that I picked up at a garage sale or thrift store. Here's the box cover. It could use more work but I wanted to get to the game itself.

Here's the board. I used hand carved images for different aspects of my life that felt important.

Can you see the little rectangles that are marked off near the images? Those are for the game cards.

I came up with a word or phrase that came up for me for each area. I wrote them on deli paper and then adhered them to the cards. 

Recent block prints

In May, I wanted to send some thank you cards to people who donated to an online fundraiser for the Bozeman Dharma Center. Since we were under a "shelter in place" order by the governor, I used that as an excuse to do some carving. Unfortunately, I mailed all the good prints out before getting a photo. And I'm too impatient to reprint right now, so here's a not so great print. 

I've been having a lot of fun playing with background textures in the carvings. Here's an image I made for personal thank you's.

Action Friday

Last Friday, my family and I went to the local National Day of Action for Black Lives rally and march. It's estimated that there were at least 5000 people there. I don't want our action to stop with attending one event. I carved this image and plan to send postcards asking leaders at national, state, and local levels what they are going to do as a person in privilege in a position of power to change systemic racism.

Lunar New Year

Looking back, it looks like I haven't shared any of the carvings I did for the last Four lunar new years! This is the one thing I consistently do every year because I participate in a lunar new year swap from the Carving Consortium. The last one I posted was year of the monkey in 2016.
So here was my print for 2017, year of the rooster.

2018: Year of the Dog

2019: Year of the Pig

2020: Year of the Rat

Stay Cool

A lot has been happening at my house-- three sets of back-to-back guests within 2 weeks.  My husband left on a business venture for 3 months.  School is getting ready to start.  My art has suffered, but this card has a good message for me.

I'm really pleased with how this turned out.  I didn't decide to add wording until I'd already carved out most of the fan.  I drew the words on backwards, directly onto the block.  Glad I didn't get any turned around!  I'm going to carve another set of words: "You got this" to go on the inside of the card.  Stamped with black Versafine inkpad and rubbed Tim Holtz wild honey distress ink on edges.

May went by too fast

Seriously, where did May go?  My main project last month was to design, carve, print, and mail my pages for a multi-color Carving Consortium swap.  I decided to try reduction prints again.

First step: Design.  I think part of the reason I procrastinated doing this swap for so long was that I had no clue what to do.  Originally, I thought of doing a tiger for a friend, but I couldn't get a design that I really liked.  Then I thought of doing one of the three pets we've lost this year, but again none of the photos we had really struck me.  Someone in my family suggested doing a Warhol style portrait which sounded fun.

I took a photo of myself and looked online to see some options for Warhol-izing my photo (this is a real term on the google!).  The easiest, free option seemed to be using Fotoflexer.  There's a pop art filter.  I did that, but in the end used some of their other filters (mainly posterize) to come up with a carving design.

I printed out seven copies of my face and outlined a different color on each copy.  On to the carving.  Remember,with a reduction print, you are carving away the color you want left behind.  So my first carving was to just carve out what I wanted left white- the color of the paper.  This just left a light pink blob.  Next, I carved out what I wanted to stay light pink and printed the next darker color.  Originally, I had planned on this being colors actually true to the photo, but then decided to go with pinks and blues.  After a couple of colors, the image started coming through.

Another darker layer and more detail comes through:

Remember that you have to print all the copies you'll need plus have extra for misprints.  Turns out I have the perfect drying space:

So, I thought I had finally gotten a handle on the reduction print thing and then I realized that no, no, I still need to practice.  For example, I decided mid-process to switch up the order I printed some colors.  Which meant that I started getting too dark without having cut out the rest of the face highlights.  I caught this before I made too many prints, although I  actually kind of like how it turned out.

 So then I cut out the highlights and went on.  At this point, I wasn't really feeling the love.  Kind of looks like a horror movie hatchet job, but I decided to trust the process and move on.

 And then another major mistake happened.  I'd been printing and carving for several days in a row trying to make the deadline for the swap.  Printing just one color takes forever.  Toward the end, I'd printed one color and had started on another color layer and then just got to tired to continue.  Unfortunately, the next day I continued on as if I had printed all of the prints for that last color and carved out everything in preparation for the last color to print.  You can imagine the stomach falling as I realized what happened.  In the end, I had to paint on some eyebrows and cheek lines, but I think it turned out okay.

This was the first time I'd tried mixing my own paints.  I used Speedball printing inks.  It's interesting trying to get the right shades.  Sometimes I definitely went too dark or too light, but over all I think they turned out okay. .

And here's the progression in blue just for fun.

 Eyebrow and cheek line on left are painted on in what I am realizing is not a dark enough color.

 Eyebrow and cheekline not painted in.

Spring carving

Although I've been doing some art, I haven't a whole lot to show for it.  One reason is that I've started carving again.  I signed up for the Carving Consortium's Spring Postcard swap.  My dog has been so excited to chase balls again now that they don't get lost in the snow.  I decided to do that for the carving.  But first I needed a photo for reference.  This took a couple days to get one that I liked.  But I forgot that with my "new" computer (already a year old), I have no easy way of getting the photos off of my camera.  So I drew the dog from the camera (which kept shutting off).  This drawing turned out much better than the one of my kids!  Then to the carving and printing!  I left some of the stray marks in for motion marks.  Usually I like a very clean carving, so leaving print marks is out of my comfort zone.  I like it in this case though.  Here's a photo of one of the final prints.

DLP #26

Well, I haven't been posting but I have been busy. I have been continuing with the  Documented Life Project.  My goal is to not be lapped which might be a tight race. 

June Theme: Travel Journaling
June 27
Art Challenge: Photos and Words
Journal Prompt:  A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
Completed: 20 Feb 2016

Heroes

I carved this in the fall in honor of a friend going through chemo right now.  I was reminded of a lyric in the song Nothing More by The Alternate Routes: "Heroes don't look like they used to, they look like you do."  This was version one:

Here's version two:

Can you see what changed in the carving?

DLP #25

June Theme: Travel Journaling
June 20
Art Challenge: Hometown Inspiration
Journal Prompt:  There is no place like home

I feel like I'm doing more inner traveling with the June prompts than documenting any actual trips.  It's all good.  

I had no idea where I was going with this page and it turned out much different than expected.  This was a good exercise in trusting because I pretty much hated this page until the very last step (putting on the smeary, black dots).

I had all kinds of fun making marks with paint: lids, bubble wrap, stencils, the end of a piece of paper.

Happy Year of the Sheep- 2015

Here's my carving for last year's Lunar New Year.  I designed it from a photo of a sheep we took in New Zealand.  The background is a Gelli plate monoprint.  I masked a rectangle in which to print the sheep.

 A little bit closer:

I'd like to print this again with printing ink instead of an ink pad to get better coverage with the sheep.

Happy Year of the Horse--2014

After posting the Year of the Monkey carving that I did, I realized that I haven't posted any "Year of" stamps since 2013!  So here was my contribution for 2014.

Sorry about the crummy lighting in the photo.  I started off trying to do make some zentangles but wasn't really enjoying that and then I remembered some symbols I'd carved for another swap that were ancient symbols of fertility and rebirth from Goddess oriented societies.  I decided to incorporate those inside the horse.  It felt appropriate for a new year carving.

DLP #24

June Theme: Travel Journaling
June 13
Art Challenge: Recording Memories
Journal Prompt:  Taking the Road Less Traveled

Happy Year of the Monkey!

Here's the carving I did for the Lunar New Year swap this year.  2016 is the year of the red fire monkey.  My monkey is based on a shadow puppet from Bali.

I used Speedball printing ink which was much slower than ink pads but gave better coverage.  It took a while to figure out the consistency of the paint and how much to put on.  I kept over inking.  Finally I started getting layers of ink thin enough to pick up details like the small lines in the eyes.