Much to my surprise, some people (well, maybe 2, my mother one of them) have asked me to write about what I am doing. I am never averse to talking about myself and lookie here, the interwebs will let me ramble on, spew drivel, cast aspersions, and otherwise talk rubbish.
Here we are in the middle of the pandemic, though California is just beginning to come out of total isolation. I have been home in my little shop for 8 weeks now while the library has been closed. I have been doing some work, yes, but mostly I have been printing.
I started out with a delicious feeling of (back then) the prospect of 3 weeks being home. After relaxing that first day, even taking a nap, I woke up on day 2 panicking that I might not find things to do. Horrors! Of course I needn’t have worried. It’s been a process, certainly, and now that I am well into it, a situation I will find tough to leave once things reopen.
Yesterday I started the last block for the book I am writing, or at this point simply making as few words have been written. The previous 9 blocks went quite smoothly, but this one is on attempt number 3. Drat! It is the 4th reduction engraving I have made for the book and I got ahead of myself, made several poor decisions, and have had to start over completely. The bad news is that I lost some time and effort (this is “bad”) but the good news is that my colophon can now be printed on a pretty rectangle of color as I reuse one set of rejects.
One of the mistakes I made was to be over-eager to use some new Hawthorn ink. This stuff dries with paper contact but will stay open on the ink table indefinitely (hence the moniker “stay open ink”). But relief and etching ink are not the right choices for engraving as their lower viscosity means they can fill the tiny lines that take such concentration to make. After one layer, I switched over to letterpress ink. Yes, both types of ink are oil-based but really self, that was dumb. Several layers later I still did not have the color I wanted, rendering me unable to move on to the next section.
Switching ink types was foolish enough but I did other stuff too. I am printing on one end of a strip of paper that is 10x16”. With all the upside down and backwards stuff of printmaking (with which I should be completely familiar considering my large format camera work), I managed to begin printing the block wrong side up. For nearly all the other illustrations this has not been an issue because they are not directional. But wouldn’t you know, this one is. But I could live with it so I continued on my journey of less than stellar decisions.
The third boneheaded thing I did was carve some ever so tiny lines to define one side of a form. In reduction printing there are several layers—sometimes many—and every layer has the chance of obscuring the small details either due to a slight shift in registration, or because of ink fill-in . This is especially true with engraving because the detail can be so fine and the carving shallow. Engraving is meant to have one layer of color applied, not multiple as reduction printing demands. One ought to save those tiniest of lines for the last layer, but clearly my wiser self was not consulted.
There were other things I could have done to rescue the image had I had additional blocks of the same size, but I didn’t and I didn’t want to order more and wait for them to arrive. The iron is hot! Strikes must occur! My solution was to move up to the next block size of which I had two (4x6”) and necessarily add more paper to the scrap heap. I am reversing the order of carving as well so that those tiny lines will be last. Theoretically it will all go swimmingly from here on in.
I have one layer of yellow printed on the latest set of pages. Carving of small circles using a multi-line engraving tool continues. The idea is to give a softer outline to the collection of viruses overtaking a cell—the subject of this piece. In fact all of the blocks have been similar subject matter. Not very original, and not even a lot of variation, but to me endlessly beautiful like so much of the microscopic world.
Check back later to see how I have mangled what at this stage appears to be a dead cert for masterpiece status.