Woodblock Class

I love Japanese woodblock, or Moku Hanga, and ukiyo-e prints, and have tons of books on the history of ukiyo-e. I'm always drawn to the imagery and detail, from the patterns in each kimono to the soft background gradation's of light and water. So when I saw a class offered on Saturdays for Japanese Woodblock printing at SVA I signed up right away. How's it going? Am I printing delicate, smoky multi-color prints of gorgeous cherry blossoms? Not exactly. It turns out the carving and printing is reallllly hard!! In the first project, a single color print, my woodblock chipped a lot, due to my poor carving skills (we had to learn how to sharpen the knives to carve well and I still don't have that down) and choice of image. Next time I'm doing a much larger flat plane and few thin lines. We printed editions of 10 (which is why you see the same 2 girls all over the website!!) and I've been playing with layering them by drawing on top of the print. It's really great learning all the actual tools to use and learning the traditional way, though, so I can't wait to start the next project and get it right this time.

My woodblock...um, it's much too deep and looks better here than the actual prints!

2 of my editions, i started only doing the girl on the left because too much ink picked up when printing the entire block