As we’ve been working on our new house in Santa Fe, I’ve often wondered “how did this get here” — yesterday my husband looked at me quizically and said “why would some previous owner have run the water pipe that way?” If only houses could talk… I recently ran across the recycling: washi tales project, a set of performance pieces that let the paper talk — each piece tells the story of a sheet of Japanese handmade paper as it is recycled through time. They seem to want to explore how the old influences the new, and in their description of the performances they say “The Papermaker, an actor who speaks the local language of the audience, serves as narrator and guide as she creates something new from what she learns of the old. Washi Tales explores aesthetic and spiritual values of recycling, beyond practical environmental concerns, into the realms of history and the imagination.”
There’s lots more on their website, with the added bonus of a lovely set of photos on papermaking and washi.
While there’s lots of free clip art available on the web, much of it isn’t very useful. But I thought this set of “typographic elements” — a collection of ampersands and “the”s available from Free Fresh Creative — was pretty novel. Download a PDF here. (Although I have to admit that I can’t readily think of where I’d use one of those “The”s.)
Molly Brooks has been posting on the handmade books livejournal about her book pop up book Rattenkonig, a picture book of pen-and-ink drawings with two pop up spreads, three cutouts, and a central 3D box structure with moving layers. There’s a picture below. In this blog post she shows her notes and sketches for designing and making the book. The finished book, with lots of photos, is here (I especially appreciate that she’s illustrated the back side of the accordion fold pages.) Finally, she recently built a box for it — see the pictures here. You can see all of Molly’s artist’s books here.
Attached to the New Mexico History Museum here in Santa Fe is a print shop, with a sign on the door that says “exhibits of working frontier presses.” Among other things, they have a Vandercook and large C&P platen and lots of type. It’s a working press with 2 full time employees — they recently printed and handbound a book of poems by the Santa Fe poet laureate and the walls are full of broadsides. I’ve been meaning to go and check the shop out, especially to find out the local letterpress resources — can I get plates made locally? Where do they buy paper and ink? I just haven’t made time.
When my friend Suzanne mentioned that there was a one day workshop there on reduction woodblock prints, I signed up immediately. First, so I would finally have to get to the print shop and get some of my questions about the local printing community answered. Second because I’ve been needing a push to experiment with the linoleum blocks I bought 2 years ago and have ignored.
The class was last Saturday and taught by Denver-based artist Leon Loughridge — that’s one of his woodblock prints above — appropriately it depicts the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe, which now houses the print shop where the workshop was held. On his website, Loughridge explains the reduction print method:
One block is used to create a multiple color print. The lightest color and the broadest area of the print is printed first for the entire edition, the block is then carved away leaving the next lightest color, which is printed. As the artist is continually removing material from the block to print the next color, the block is destroyed in the processes of making the image. The edition size is determined by how many acceptable impressions exist after the final color is printed.
There’s a nice example with photos of reduction printing on the Zum Gali Gali website.
It was a lovely day of both demonstration and hands-on cutting and printing and included a set of detailed notes. Loughridge uses a C&P like mine to print some of his editions. He doesn’t use rubber-based ink, but Caligo ink that he gets at McClains. It’s an oil-based ink that can be washed away with liquid soap and water (he used Simple Green). He creates texture on his prints using a pressure printing technique — he roughly brushes a piece of paper with gel medium, lets it dry and puts the sheet under the tympan. When he prints, the ink coverage is effected by the stipple created by the gel medium, to get a pattern like the light color in the tree foliage above. And the class worked the intended magic — I’ve already worked up 2 simple designs to practice carving and printing, and I’ve even drawn one on my abandoned linoleum blocks!
