[Baren]: The mailing list / discussion forum for woodblock printmaking. Baren Digest Sunday, 9 January 2000 Volume 10 : Number 852 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Cucamongie@aol.com Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 10:08:09 EST Subject: [Baren 7563] exchange 3 I took a look at the exchange 3 prints last night - what a wonderful collection - congratulations all! wish I was a part of this exchange so I could see it all "in the flesh."- best wishes Sarah ------------------------------ From: Hideshi Yoshida Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 00:20:01 +0900 Subject: [Baren 7564] Re: Kampala and Junintoiro and elephants Dear Josephine, >Hideshi, I was just looking at your work. Very nice. I take it you are >influenced by Escher? As you think, I am. when I was in elementary school, he let me know what I had to do in my life. He is a master for me. Hideshi P.S. Sorry for a late answer. ------------------------------ From: Gayle Wohlken Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 10:20:23 -0500 Subject: [Baren 7565] Re: Baren Digest V10 #851 (Marco's Portraits) Marco, your portraits are boldly energetic yet sensitive. I could feel these people's essential core. I feel I want to meet these people. These have the intensity of oil based ink, but are we to understand you did these hanga style? Gayle ------------------------------ From: Vollmer/Yamaguchi Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 12:26:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Baren 7566] Coverage I know everyone has been waiting with baited breath to find out if I was able to re-cover Sarah Hauser's baren. I am happy to report that with the use of all six hands Sarah, Barbara Hearn and I were able to re-cover not only Sarah's, but my own baren as well. They are a little lumpy at the middle, but I think with some practice that will improve. One of the great things about printmaking, and especially hanga, is sharing information and learning from those who have gone before....we had a fun hour working togtether. And Graham's page http://members.home.net/woodblocks/Tiebaren.html was very helpful. I would however, recommend NOT using olive oil to oil your baren, it gets very sticky after a while, and is a disaster on a ball bearing baren. Mineral oil squirted onto a felt pad is the cheap alternative to camellia oil. And Graham, the ferule info is great, those ferules never fit right! Maybe the change in humidity does that. Josephine, my dragon (fly) is on nishinouchi paper, printed in pigment dispersion and sumi ink. Thank you for the link to my web page. Wanda et al. After outlining my printing areas with the bevel side of the hangi-to (this would be the right side for a righ hander), I cut my sute-bori (never knew what it was called before!) with a u-gouge. I think this trench protects the accurate, careful hangi-to line from the vigorous clearing strokes for the low areas. The last step is to clear the waste from close to the hangi-to line with my little aisuki. Am I a good girl? >I use the flat side of the "to" to cut the kento & borders, which are >pretty much straight up and down But, Wanda, a kento-nomi (or a 15 mm chisel) will give a much cleaner kento! FINALLY, Thank you Dave, for the great, great Exchange #3 page. What a perfect way to present the work. You make it easy to see overall, easy to see a closeup, and easy to comment. Really really nice. And the prints aren't bad, either! I am sorry I can't participate in all the exchanges, an impressive group of prints. April Vollmer ------------------------------ From: Graham Scholes Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 10:21:22 -0800 Subject: [Baren 7567] Re: Coverage April wrote.... > with the use of all six hands Sarah, Barbara Hearn >and I were able to re-cover not only Sarah's, but my own baren as well. Six hands!!!!! But isn't that cheating. (<::: >Mineral oil squirted onto a felt pad Kleenex tissue word just a nicely. Graham ------------------------------ From: Ruth Leaf Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 15:55:13 -0700 Subject: [Baren 7568] Re: Baren Digest V9 #849 Thank you John for the dandy and he is a dandy dragon. Was the engraving done in Zinc, copper or plastic? Ruth ------------------------------ From: Pedrobot@aol.com Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 20:58:59 EST Subject: [Baren 7569] New Prints I finally got around to scanning my most recent prints. Whith the exception of the one I did for exchange #4, they are all at: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/5426/prints2.html If anybody wants to send me any feedback, I'd appreciate it. Constructive criticism would be particularily helpful. I'm thick-skinned and eager to learn. - --Pete ------------------------------ From: Julio.Rodriguez@walgreens.com Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 20:35:58 -0600 Subject: [Baren 7570] Backyard stuff A few more beasties have arrived and are now enjoying themselves with all the other dragons(15 in, 16 to come). Thanks Sylvia (mom and baby dragon made the trip across the Atlantic just fine!) and someone named Queen Mariah (wow! my first dragon stamp!)........there is even one who's crashed the party even thou he/she clearly does not belong in the backyard....but heck...I am not going in there to chase him out!!!! see if you can tell who the crasher is.......first winner gets to feed the dragons for a whole week! http://www.skokienet.org/bandits/jcrstuff/dragons.html ------------------------------ From: David Bull Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 12:46:58 +0900 Subject: [Baren 7571] Re: Throw-away cutting ... Try to get a few minutes to answer a couple of things while munching my Starbucks 'Basmati Chicken' sandwich ... Mmmm _love_ those things! April wrote: > I would > however, recommend NOT using olive oil to oil your baren, it gets very > sticky after a while, and is a disaster on a ball bearing baren. Mineral > oil squirted onto a felt pad is the cheap alternative to camellia oil. I'll 'second' that - about the olive oil. Vegetable oils are not the stuff you want to be rubbed on the back of your prints ... A felt pad though, isn't really the best thing to use. After a while, small strands of the felt come loose, and once the pad starts shedding, it gets everywhere, including on the block. Cotton cloth is the material of choice here usually. > After outlining my printing areas with the bevel side of the > hangi-to (this would be the right side for a righ hander), I cut my > sute-bori (never knew what it was called before!) with a u-gouge. I think > this trench protects the accurate, careful hangi-to line from the vigorous > clearing strokes for the low areas. The last step is to clear the waste > from close to the hangi-to line with my little aisuki. Am I a good girl? I have no idea if you are a 'good' girl or not April (I think the 'bad' girls all hang out over in After Five), but there is a little bit of confusion here about the term 'sute-bori'. Jack earlier wrote: > To those of you that carve the outline with a hangi-to, how many of you > carve the sute-bori, or "throw away cut", to form a little "trench" > around the design, before clearing away the rest of the block? The most common carving method in use in the traditional field here goes like this: (1) incise the lines with the hangi-to. (Maybe make a second angled cut to release some of the wood against the line, if you wish). (2) run around nearby and make a trench with the maru-nomi (3) clear the open wide areas (up to the trench) with a 'soai-nomi' (4) clear the last bit between the lines and the trench with the 'aisuki' This is just as April described. But 'sute-bori' is the term used for a totally different cut - one that comes _before_ all of those steps. If you are trying to carve a very tight corner (say when doing small circles, or something like that), the tip of the knife will frequently break. This happens because if you turn sharply without making forward motion, the blade will of course be stressed strongly. If however, before you cut the main line itself, you cut another line about a millimetre away - angled back toward the main line (this is actually just doing things a bit backwards - cutting the second face of that releasing 'V' cut _first_), then a thin strip of wood will be released by the blade action when you cut the main line. With most of the stress thus avoided, you will encounter much less blade breakage. Looking through the prints of Exchange #3, I don't really see many places where this sort of technique would be useful to most of you, but in my surimono prints, believe me I use it all the time. > Also, I found a reference (in Morley Fletchers book) on the use of > the hangi-to, where he states that in cutting, the flat side of the > blade is always against the line, which seems backwards to me. That > means that you would always cut to the -right- of the line, and cutting > to the _left_ of the line seems more natural to me. No no no! Flat side against the line! (Do I need to re-emphasize that I am speaking of _traditional_ methods here?) It makes a _tremendous_ difference in the finished block. > If I cut to the > right of the line, my big fist will be in my line of view. Move your big fist over to the left out of the way. This will be difficult to describe in words, but here goes. Grab the knife in your right fist, with your thumb up on top, and the blade pointing downward towards the block. Look downwards and line everything up - your nose, your thumb, the tip of the blade (you can't see this at this point), and the place you want to cut (you can't see this either yet). Next, _tilt_ your hand to the left - way way way to the left. Maybe 35~40 degrees. _Now_ you can see the tip, and the 'target'. Stick the blade into the wood - on the _right_ side of the target line, with the _flat_ side of the blade against the line. (This is all based on right handed people with a right handed blade.) If necessary, move your head slightly to the right, to help get the cutting point in view. Bring up your other hand, and use the tip of that middle finger (or index finger) to brace the blade of the knife against the pressure you are about to bring into play. Start cutting, drawing the knife slowly down the line. Counterbalance the cutting pressure and the pressure from your left hand so that just enough 'oomph' is left to produce a cut. Get it right, and the knife will move slowly through the wood, and there will be no chance at all of slipping. You should, I think, have a completely clear view of the line. When you get to the 'bottom' of that particular cut, pull out the knife, go back to the top, and do it on the other side of the line. Your fist flips over to the other side, and this side of the line will be carved by the bevelled side of the blade. Your fist thus flips back and forth from side to side as you carve here and there on the block, and it is this flipping that produces the angled bevels on the sides of the carved lines. Sure would be nice to have a good photo essay on this in the Encyclopedia! (One day ...) Dave Enough typing ... sandwich finished, so it's back to my _own_ block ... ------------------------------ From: Brad Schwartz Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 21:42:53 -0800 Subject: [Baren 7573] New Printmaking Books? Hi... Just looking around on Amazon.com and found a few books I haven't heard of... Anyone seen any of these? Good/bad? The Encyclopedia of Printmaking Techniques (Encyclopedia of Art) by Judy Martin The Best of Printmaking : An International Collection by Lynne Allen(Editor), et al Prints and Printmaking : An Introduction to the History and Techniques by Antony Griffiths Brad Schwartz ------------------------------ From: "John Ryrie" Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 17:08:16 +1100 Subject: [Baren 7575] Re: Baren Digest V9 #849 charset="iso-8859-1" Ruth it was done on plastic 'Perspex' (called Plexiglas in America). John ------------------------------ From: B Mason Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 23:04:59 -0800 Subject: [Baren 7576] Re: New Printmaking Books? Brad, You might check to see how old these are, I haven't heard of them but if they are real old you probably don't want to bother unless someone can give you a better recommendation. Barbara ------------------------------ From: Studio Dalwood Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 22:06:31 +1100 Subject: [Baren 7577] Prints Now there's an original subject line for a printmaking group. Pete your prints are Ok with me. The dragon 'reads' much better in colour, but I suspect that is because he was designed that way. Loved the penquins, nice idea of repeating one block. I saw a paperdoll cutout from an etching that someone made last year, this reminded me of it, it was good. Can I keep your grampa? He looks like a nice man. I like the looseness and expression in the cutting. It is hard to keep this together when you are being representational. One of the differences between traditional prints and otherwise I think is that non-traditional is more forgiving in freedom of cutting. My two day cutting episode has been rejected by the 'boss' who came home from work and rejected the print as 'too tight'. The difficulties I was having with the tools shows in the print. He's right, I'll have to re-do it. But on the brighter side, I have now permission to purchase a new set of tools. Big brother owns an art supplies store so I can get them at cost. I just have to travel the length of the east coast to north Qld to get them. He's two days drive away. But I am going up there in a few months anyway so no problem. In the meantime I have decided to do #5 in lino if no-one objects? Does anyone object? If you do I have this tight woodblock here.... Josephine ------------------------------ End of Baren Digest V10 #852 ****************************