Tore ourselves away from our mid-winter torpor today and ventured out to print shop in the Clifton area called Friend of Mine. They were hosting a woodcut workshop as part of the preliminaries for the CeLOUbrate Print festival put on by the Portland Museum here in town.
The workshop was free, with all materials provided. Everyone was given a 12"x12" block of medium density fiberboard and a piece of paper to sketch your design. Once you had it sketched, you traced it over carbon paper to transfer it to you block of wood. If it was symmetrical that is, otherwise you had to flip it over and trace it in reverse so the prints would look right.
After that it was time to get carving. MDF carves surprisingly easy, you just have to be careful not to try and dig too deeply.
To make prints with the blocks they're going to ink them up and run them over with a steamroller. The raised areas will be what transfers ink, so we were carving out the areas that were to be blank on the print.
The fun with the steamroller isn't until April 19th, when the CeLOUbrate Print shindig goes down. We caught it last year but didn't manage to catch any of the workshops leading up to it, so we just got to watch other folks making prints.
Wasn't going to make the same mistake this year. I think this was the second of the three woodcut workshops held around town, with one more at the beginning of March.
My fingertips kept going numb from holding the carving tool, took these while I was waiting for feeling to come back. Even that didn't keep me from having fun.
We brought our blocks home to continue working on them. You can kind of make out mine in the foreground above.
Guess there's nothing else to do but carve out the time until April 19th.
Oh, a sun you have carved! I like it very much. What an interesting activity (I would like to participate in a craft workshop) and how well you have documented it.
Cheers!
Thank you! I've always been fond of the Sol de Mayo, wanted to try an make something along those lines. It was such a fun activity, we'd seen the results last year and couldn't wait to try it ourselves.
Cheers!