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.

 

 

The Biggest Project I Never Finished

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably got a few unfinished projects lying around. Little things that you lost momentum on, or got tired of, or just forgot about. You tell yourself you’ll get back to them one day and finish, right?

I have lots of little unfinished projects. But I also have one big one–a cross stitch project so huge, so daunting, so seriously stupid in scale that it has followed me for four years without completion. I have moved twice, graduated from college, and gone through several jobs while sporadically working on this. It sits in my closet, shaming me into pulling it back out every few months.

This is it: the white whale of art projects.

It’s a cross stitch portrait of accordion superstar Jason Webley.

For reference, each of those little squares in the grid is 10 x 10, meaning that each square contains 100 separate stitches. The entire piece is somewhere around 15,000 stitches, containing over 150 colors. The image as a whole measures roughly 9″ x 12″, so those 15,000 stitches are also freaking tiny.

DO YOU SEE HOW TINY THEY ARE.

Those are the patterns (note the plural) on the left.

I have worked on this for over four years. It has come with me on trains, on planes, and in various friends’ and family members’ vehicles, to at least three different states. I don’t know how many hours have gone into this thing, but it’s safe to say that I’ve sunk more time into it than is probably healthy.

Here I am working on it while on vacation in 2010. Look how adorable and naive I was, thinking I’d be finished in a couple of months.

BUT NO MORE. I could really use a win right now, and completing this monster is going to be the crowning achievement of my summer. I’ll be posting updates throughout the week, so stay tuned for some thrilling cross stitch action.