Last night during my Japanese Woodblock class at MCBA I played with recombining past woodblocks to make a new image. I used the child from “Parking Lot Snow Mountain” and the ant I carved for “Diggers” to make this new encounter between a child an an ant. I printed a few that I will trade with my students for their prints next week.
Ant meets Child
I have been printing a bit!
I pulled out some invertebrate stamps I carved a while ago and made prints to send to my students in my online class Collaborative Printmaking:
I also did some more construction observation with my son. This backhoe with loader and jackhammer caught our attention and we followed it along University Ave until I finished sketching it:
I then re-drew my sketch directly onto a woodblock using pencil and watercolors. I changed the proportions a bit and my son added some gestural marks:
Here’s an image of the block after I’ve done much of the carving. I carved some of my son’s drawing but not all of it. Next to it is a block with a drawing of a sow bug (or wood louse or whatever you like to call it) that I drew from life directly on the block from a live model scurrying around in a jar. I have just barely started carving this one.
And here is an ant I’m about halfway done carving. I drew this in pencil on the block from a macro photo of an ant that my dad took.
Stay tuned to see if I can put this all together into a finished print before I leave to teach my class at Peninsula School of Art next week!
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