Art Media: Woodcut

I’ve run out of engraving blocks, so the the last few prints of mine have been made using whatever scrap materials I have hanging around my studio. This is a small chiaroscuro woodcut made using two blocks. On block has the black lines and another has gray tones.

My ability to correctly register the blocks is limited. I had to throw away about a third of the prints because they were severely misaligned or other glitches. The final result is this small edition.

Cat prints seem to sell well, so here’s another cat print, but I couldn’t resist adding a little gore.

The image here is based on some ideas I had for a more involved piece. Lately, I’ve been reading about and re-visiting a bunch of Goya’s art so highwaymen and other scofflaws were on my mind. I had this small wood block and thought this image of a man holding a knife would look good at that scale.

Process Photos

This image started out as a possible Nonagon album cover design. It only got as far as a quick sketch on a wood block before the idea was vetoed and we moved on to something else. I found the block while cleaning out my studio and decide this was worth finishing.

The completed image was printing in a small run of 12 prints and I’ve put them up for sale hoping to cash in on Nonagon-mania.

Time-Lapse of the Printing Process

This woodcut’s title is based on a Van Der Graaf Generator song title but it’s only tangentially related to the song.

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 print is from a series of 12 prints.