Printed Embroidery

A few days ago I made a post about my collection of vintage printing blocks, with a teaser about a new project I used them for.

It’s probably pretty self-explanatory–I used them as embroidery patterns. By taking them through my Challenge proof press with carbon paper, I printed them on unbleached linen, then embroidered the images.

Printmaking and embroidery are two mediums I don’t often get to combine. Somehow using antique printing blocks as a base for a similarly antiquated medium like embroidery seems kind of right.

These are each in either 3″ or 5″ hoops.

And right now, they’re all available for sale at the Corvallis Art Center’s Art Shop!

Bonus Oregonian tree embroidery:

Type Cuts

On the shelf above my workbench there’s a box.

That box contains my collection of type cuts–also known as printing blocks, or letterpress cuts. They’re images etched into wood or lead, meant to be printed alongside letterpress type.

It’s an eclectic mix of images that I’ve hand picked for one reason or another. These are a few of my favorites:

This one is a simplified line etching of a traditional platen press–the kind of printing press used for traditional letterpress printing.

As a Pacific Northwest native, I do love trees.

And crabs.

By far my strangest cut is this one–it’s about 3″ across, and was presumably used for creating dental records. Can you even imagine something as mundane as dental records being hand printed?

But this one is my favorite. Surrounded by intricate images of elk and horses and trees and other oddities, this pointing hand is the jewel of my collection. It looks like metal but it’s not–this is my only wood etched type cut, carved from a single piece of wood rather than from lead (or lead mounted on a wood base).

The hand itself is probably recognizable–this design, called a manicule, has become popular in modern graphic design. They were originally used to draw attention to important text in documents and books dating back to the 12th century, a common form of marginalia on some of the earliest letterpress printed materials.

Given its history and delicate line quality, it’s hard not to love. I mean look at the individual carved lines–so much information in such sparse, elegant detail. This is what you think of when you think traditional woodcut design.

I recently used a few of my favorite cuts for a somewhat eclectic project, which I’ll explain in a later post. For now, here’s a teaser:

Happy Friday!

Neck Muscle Study, 2015

In the spirit of my New Year’s resolution, I finally finished the muscle study I started way back in October. The original sketch for this stemmed from some neck issues I’d been having, which got me thinking in terms of muscles–a departure from my usual focus on skeletal structure, but just as interesting.

Neck Muscle Study, 2015

I’m still trying to decide how this will be displayed–either in the hoop, as shown here, or stretched around a wooden frame.

I’ve been both praised and criticized for showing embroidery in the hoop. Personally I don’t think there’s a problem with displaying it in a way that reflects the utilitarian tradition of the medium. That’s half the reason I do it: to connect the artwork to its roots. An embroidery hoop is a simple, elegant item, rife with history, and used in the right context, it can add another layer of meaning to the work it holds. Why shy away from that?

Love it or hate it, you have to admit that it’s visually striking to see a piece hanging like this: the raw edge of the fabric, the wrinkles, the shape of the whole thing. I’ll probably clean this up a bit before it’s shown anywhere, but if I’m being perfectly honest, I prefer it this way, loose threads and all.

What about you, fellow embroiderers? How do you hang your work?

2014 Recap

In retrospect, 2014 was not my most prolific year.

What little work I did turn out was some of my best — my skull studies, Pacific Northwest alphabet book, and various other small projects. I was even lucky enough to be featured in Mixed Media Art Magazine. But full time employment leaves little time for personal projects, and this year my creative efforts flagged considerably in favor of lazier and less fulfilling pursuits. I imagine I’m not the first person to fall victim to creative malaise, but that’s no excuse.

I’m planning for 2015 to be better. I’ve got some vague project ideas, some even vaguer goals, and bunch of sharpened pencils, so I’m good to go. Here’s to a fresh year.

 

 

Mountain Woodcut

The theme the past couple of weeks has been mountains! Mainly because of the beautiful places in the Pacific Northwest. This is a phone picture from a recent camping trip in the Opal Creek wilderness, and I have a lot more fairly similar pictures from places in and around the Willamette Valley. Having looked at these views (and bad cell phone pictures of them) most of my life, I decided I needed to learn to draw mountains and trees–a more daunting task than it sounds, trust me. First I did a smaller woodcut, about 3″ x 5″, shown here. But even with my micro Flexcut tools, which are seriously the most awesome woodcarving tools ever made, I can’t get much detail or texture in such a small block.So I decided to try a bigger block.

This is a roughly 2′ x 3′ hunk of plywood that’s been hanging around my studio for about four years. I don’t remember where the hell it came from, or what I originally intended to do with it, but it’s relatively unwarped and has a pretty sweet grain, so I’m guess I’m going to carve it. This is way bigger than I usually work, so we’ll see how it goes. It’s worth noting that this block won’t actually fit in my cylinder press–I’ll have to print it by hand with a baren when it’s finished, but that’s okay. I never expected to actually own a printing press, so I made sure to learn how to hand press before I graduated from school, thinking that would be my only option in the future.

Here’s the finished drawing. The foreground/background differentiation doesn’t look great, but I’m hoping I can smooth some of that out with the carving, making it a little more gradated. Unfortunately the carving process has been slow, in part due to a strained neck muscle and partly because of my dedicated studio cat, Rosie. Apparently my woodblock is a really good place to sit.

But fall weather is the best for printmaking in my opinion (and the best weather for anything else, period) so here’s hoping I’m able to get some serious carving in this week.

 

 

Pacific Northwest Alphabet Book

A while back I was invited to donate a piece of art for a fundraiser in March. Because the submission deadline is actually in February, I’ve been working hard to finish a new book before the due date–an alphabet book of Pacific Northwest animals.

Thanks to the internet I was able to find an animal for every letter, which proved more difficult than I’d initially thought. Then I sketched each one, carved them onto woodblocks, and printed them onto sekishu paper, a process that took about two weeks altogether.

My chaotic but excellent workspace.

The Challenge proof press. It was actually nice outside when I started printing this weekend, so I got to open up my garage door and get some sunshine. Look at all them prints. A is for anemone! And weirdly enough so is Z in this series, because the only Z animal I could find was another type of anemone.Even though the most time consuming part of the process is finished, I still have to trim these prints, mount them to the pages of the book, make the covers and sew the book itself. So here’s hoping I can get all that done before my deadline.