Blockhead

My Christmas cards started a fire. I've been working on various block prints this month, and this week, I made these, for assembly into cards:

and these:

I am so pleased with both of them and with the whole printing process. It's so different from painting, and I love it just as much, in a very different way.

I've been using thinned acrylic paint instead of inks, but today I went to Jerry's Artarama to get more rubber blocks and lino blocks to carve, and decided to try some water-soluble printing inks. This will be my first lino carving, too; I've been using Speedy-Stamp rubber sheets. I do believe the lino will be better for letters, as the rubber is so squishy that it smears the paint on smaller details (I think it would have been better if the paint were thinner, too). But the rubber is easier to carve away and I think the lino will be easier to carve into, so I expect to use them for different purposes.

I've been inspired lately by this book:

Handmade Prints

by Anne Desmet and Jim Anderson.

It's full of beautiful examples, many of which are simply stunning. It explains everything neatly and concisely, in a straightforward, matter-of-fact style, while not talking down to the reader (so many books these days assume the reader is either already an expert or in fifth grade) . And the authors make even the more complicated printing methods seem entirely possible and doable, and fun, to boot. Which is really why I like printing so much in the first place.