New Year's Resolutions

 Let's see how well I do! 

Something I have been wanting to do on the new Stampeaz site is publish some tutorials, tips and tricks for carving and printing. I just published the first one, so we'll see how well I keep my resolution and whether people find it at all useful.  I have plans for several more already and we'll see where I go from there.  

The first installment is a quick tutorial on how I prepare a block before transferring an image or carving. I like to use the sanding method and it's really, really easy to do. So, if you're interested, the post is on the Stampeaz site in the blog section here.

Here's the before and after picture to try and entice you... :)

 

Showing Up....

Where on earth have I been? In the studio, making and clip framing lots of images for a juried holiday art show. 

These are a few of my pieces that are in the show, "Big Group, Small Works", which opened last Saturday and runs until January 1, 2020. I'm pretty excited (now that I've recovered) and I really hope some of my work sells. 

One wall of the gallery is going to be filled with 6 x 6  inch works, sort of like an Instagram wall (I don't do Instagram, so I'm not really familiar with that). Another wall will be filled with 4 x 4 inch art. The idea is to have a display of small, affordable pieces of original art, so people can give gifts of art for the holidays. Pretty cool idea, right? 

Webfoot's Tan Sample Material Test #2 - Text and Knife

Once again, I sanded the surface before doing a toner-based heat transfer to the sample.

The transfer went pretty well. I didn't worry about getting the transfer past the point where I could see everything well enough to carve it. I think the contrast on this color is much better than it was on the gray sample.

I did my first test print with my cheapest dye ink on a fairly porous piece of scrap paper - I didn't think of it at the time, since I was sort of focused on the carving part of the process, but I should have used the same paper I sent out to all the testers. D'oh! So, the ink coverage wasn't great, but that's not what I was looking for at this point in the process. I wanted to see if the letters looked clean or ragged. They looked pretty clean. 

I found that the fresh, sharp Testor's knife carved through the sample very nicely with good control in little corners and interior spaces, as well as 's' curves and other areas that can be challenging for me. I also tested the block with a well used, dull knife that I had sitting on my table and it didn't carve nearly as well as it did with the sharp one. I discarded that knife as a tool pretty quickly. So, for me, the sharpness of the blade made a clear difference.  

Another test print on another scrap with the same dye ink. Even unmounted, I didn't have any trouble with stray carving marks being printed where I didn't want them, so the material was firm enough to withstand a decent amount of pressure. 

Here's the final print on the nicer index paper using Brilliance pigment ink. I mounted the carving on a small acrylic block  For size reference, the acrylic mount is one by three inches. 

The sample was sent to me curled up in a tube, so there was a bit of concavity to the carving surface. It didn't bother me while carving at all, but it might have been a problem for printing, without the acrylic mount - of course, an eighth inch is still too thin for me to manage without a mount anyway, so I'd have had trouble in either case. If my tester results come back positive enough and I decide to have a run of this material made, I'll have to make sure that it comes out flat.

Webfoot's Tan Sample Material Test #1

The new samples arrived and I spent a couple days in the basement playing with various tools and techniques to put this stuff through its paces. I thought it had a pretty good gait, as it turns out. I scheduled this post a few days after testing the material and writing my results up, to give my testers a chance to do their own trials without seeing what my opinion was. 

Here's the actual block, glued to a piece of acrylic so that I could print it easily, without getting stray ink from my fingers all over the paper. This sample block was about 1/8" thick. I did not mount it to carve, but I'm good at making messes with ink, so printing was another matter entirely.

I sanded the block to prep it before using the heat transfer method with a toner-based copy of the art work. I used Staedtler and Speedball gouges, modified and unmodified and a Testor's hobby knife, though the gouges worked better in this application. My next test will be with knives and text, just to see how it compares to PZ and OZ for detail and carvability when doing letters.

Here's the final print, on white index paper with Brilliance Coffee Bean ink. I was pretty pleased with how it came out and happy with the level of detail the block allowed me to get. I'm going to be really interested in what my merry band of testers thinks of this stuff. 

By the way, this is Ollie - he's a friend's new puppy and I think he's way too cute.

The Finished Daffodil Carving

The samples of the new carving material went into the mail yesterday, winging their way to my band of intrepid testers. I find that I am feeling a lot like a kid in the back seat of a car on a long vacation drive getting antsy for the wait to end already. 

"Are they there, yet?"  

"Have they tried it yet?"

In order to keep myself from climbing the walls in nervous anticipation, I went back to the basement and played with my piece of the sample some more. These are both quick and dirty pictures I took this morning with my phone, so that I could do a fast follow-up on the carving material post from the other day. That means the quality of the photos isn't up to my usual standard, but I knew it would take me too long to go with the camera routine - can you tell I've about run out of patience for anything?

The finished block was a little hard to print, because it was so thin that I kept getting ink all over everything. Finally, I developed the knack for carefully inking, then wiping off the edges of the acrylic block to which I had glued the carving for printing stability, before getting anywhere near the paper. Oh, and I wiped my inky fingers off, too...

Then, just for fun, I did a little color ink wash to brighten things up and turned it into a card. 

Sometimes, just because you can means you probably should.

So, somebody will probably get a St. David's Day card from me this year. 

Framed!

If you wondered why I dropped off the face of the blog world for a couple of weeks, here's what happened. I was challenged to share a booth at a local art show with a couple other artisans who wanted to dip their toes into marketing their work. It's something I had been thinking about doing for a while and it was a great opportunity to get some feedback.

So, I went down into the studio and spent a couple weeks gathering all the images I had already finished, printing up things I thought people might like, matting, framing, packaging and getting ready for showing my carved art. Here you see everything loaded into the back of my car ready to go to the show venue.

Here's my little section of our table setup. I had individual cards, boxed cards, matted prints and framed prints. 

Here's another shot from a different angle. It's crowded, yes, but I guess that just means I got really excited about getting ready and wanted to make sure I had enough of a selection for people to see.

And here are a couple framed pieces at the back of another part of the display. 

The show was a great experience. There were 45 local artists showing their work and there was some awesome stuff there! I learned a lot about what people responded to and also made a connection with a local gallery shop that has started to carry my work. 

The Studio / Packing Room

You saw "The Lego Project" out in the garage in the previous blog installment. This is the studio/packing room that my sister helped me reorganize and reclaim while she was here. My day job schedule and the holiday hustle and bustle had caused a disaster area here and it not only got cleaned up, it got a complete make-over! My sister is wonderful!!

We moved the packing table along with lots of supplies and the PZ Kut prep cart, went flea market shopping and found new storage systems (some with great folk art paintings on them!). We also moved a huge shelving unit that was a ratted mess and I had to go through everything and organize it (or throw it away!). I now have a much more open and pleasant work area to stamp invoices, pack orders and even stamp into the occasional PLB!! On the table, there are stamped invoices ready and waiting to be taken to the storage area and have me pull the items people want from inventory.

Of particular note, of course, is the AQ calendar on the wall in the upper right-hand corner of the photo. :)