This year (2019) I forced myself to just site down and make a wood engraving with the last tiny block of resingrave I had in my studio. This is just an image of a random guy, not anyone in particular. This is the first edition that I was able to print on my cheap Chinese book press. Not the most perfect system—the blacks are a little salty—but it worked out well enough.
This tiny wood engraving started out as a practice block. I was rendering the bones of a foot. I got bored with that and drew a dude shaking his fist. Inspiration! Anyhow, this is a small wood engraving printed on sekishu rice paper. I have been having a heck of a time getting engravings to print sharply these days so these prints are a little saltier than I like. I’m on the lookout for any advice on hand-printing wood engravings. Leave a comment, commentators!
I have had this wood block sitting around for years and years now. Every year I would make a resolution to finish it and, like all resolutions, never followed through. Until now! I was able to squeeze this in before the ball dropped in 2018 and now my twelve print Grand Voyage series is a thirteen print series.
Originally, I was visualizing that the series would be comprised of three books of twelve prints. That was back when I was young, stupid and enthralled by the Lord of the Rings movies. The main problem with my ambitions were that I don’t really have a full story fleshed out (and I’m lazy). I knew the two main characters would be separated and not much else after that.
This print shows the first moments of that separation when the fisherman is banished to the king’s dungeons. There really isn’t a satirical point to this image. It is just a way to introduce the inhabitants with a sense of tension and foreboding. I dunno. Just look at the pretty lines.
This print was created to be used as a back cover illustration for Nonagon’s The Last Hydronaut EP. After incorporating the image into the layout I editioned the print to be given out as a freebie with the first fifty copies of the record.
I created this print during the height of the anti-Iraq war protests. It’s about being against everything and for nothing. After I finished editioning this print, I created a two-tone reduction print version of it that looks much cooler, but I only manged to make one copy of that.
In 2000 I finally was able to find time to create a hand-printed Christmas card as opposed to a set of generic cards that Wika and I would just buy from Wal-Mart.
This is a wood engraving that I created for my brother’s wedding invitation in 2002. He got married in Athens, Greece so I wanted to do a Greek god themed image.Here we have Hera and Zeus, with Zeus cutting the cake with his lightning bolt. The actual invitation had a translucent sheet in front of the print with some metallic lettering and an olive leaf motif.
A tiny wood engraving I did. Technically it’s not a wood engraving since I engraved into a plastic engraving medium called “Resingrave.” I have plenty of copies available for purchase.
This is another “Resingrave” wood engraving. This one is a portrait of my wife, Wika, wearing surgical magnifying glasses.
An edition of 24, I have plenty of copies available for purchase. The price is a mere fifteen bucks! Postage paid! If you are interested in purchasing one, click the link to the left.
