Hello everyone, I hope you are doing well. I will be talking about a new artist's inspiration, a new piece, and a new direction for my printmaking. But first a little recap, I have finished my shows for this year. I had a really good reception and feedback at all of my shows, and I did decently at my last ones. I found good markets it's now just finding the best shows for me. I got to experience my first fall here in the Northeast, they say the colors weren’t as “peak” this year due to the warmer weather, but I still managed to find some beautiful fields of trees! Looking forward to the rest of the year I will be taking an illustration for magazine course at the start of November, I am hoping to get into some freelance work and open another stream of revenue. I will also be opening a society 6 shop where I will have more digital, and graphic types of art and posters, and finally I will be making more block prints and continue to develop my new direction, which brings us to the main topic of today.

For a while now I have wanted to push my style and my prints. after a year and a half of making block prints in a similar style, I felt like I needed to push myself to take it to a new level. My prints consist of either a landscape or animal and I would put it in “its natural habitat” it was fairly straight forward, subject and scenery. Those prints are what I call my “natural” drawing style. The challenge with those prints was overcoming the obstacle of carving, since I when started doing these prints at the beginning of 2018 I had only done a handful of lino carvings, and coming up with the natural habitat that blended in with the piece but not taking away from the subject. Over that time and about 30 prints later I felt more confident carving and drawing the pieces seemed to click. Over the summer I started thinking of how or what I can do to push my prints. I did a lot of research looking at other printmakers, styles, scenes, and one thing that I was always being drawn to was the work of the Arts and Crafts Movement. One of the most famous artist out of this movement was William Morris. William Morris was a master in many art forms and is most remembered for the Kelmscott press and the many intricate patterns he designed. The Arts and Crafts movement was all about bringing nature and high craft into our lives. It was a rebuttal against the first wave of manufacturing, and honoring the craft of making something. It is something I think we lost now in today's society.

So I was exploring the works of Morris and others I felt inspired and that I found a direction to take my printmaking. My prints have always been about highlighting the beauty of the natural world and I am keeping alive a long-lived craft of carving that many people have forgotten. I started by doing some sketching of patterns, One thing I was trying to figure out was I do I take what I have been doing and incorporate that into my new direction of this arts and crafts movement? Well, I am still figuring that out, but I will walk you through my first print.

I had a sketch of a cardinal bird I did back in May, my original plan was to just do a little 5x7 print of out, but when working on some pattern sketches I decided to take that cardinal and turn it into my subject. I had this oak leaf and acorn sketch and thought that could work well with the bird, but I came across a problem with turning that into a pattern. In the end, it was distracting and the two competed for attention. So then I went found one of Morris’s leaf patterns. I loosely sketch out the basics of it, It had a main vine that ran through the middle and branched out. Once I had some lines that would continually repeat I went back and filled in one section of the pattern, copied it and readapted it. Then I pieced it all together in photoshop having the cardinal in the center and having a patterned border around it. I went back and simplified the pattern a bit, looking back, for my next piece I think I will simplify my next pattern more. Having the image ready I began what turned out to be the very long process of transferring the image onto the lino block. I used carbon paper to transfer and drawing every line to get a complete transfer. this took about 2 weeks to do. I was working on it off and on as I had another print I was doing and shows. I wish I kept track of the hours working on it, but before I even began carving it was one of the longest amounts of times I’ve spent on a print.

Now for the carving, there was no way around it but slow and steady progress. This was going to test my ability as a carver and going into it I wasn’t quite sure I had the skill. I started with the border, I like to start with the hardest thing in any print, because it builds my confidence, once the hard part is out of the rest is smooth sailing! Unfortunately for me, the border was most of the print. I took a time-lapses of my time carving and have a video for you to watch. It took about 40 hours to carve. while carving I was pretty pleased with myself and I tried hard to have the pattern be uniformed. I defiantly made mistakes, I got lost several times from the drawing to the transfer. Carving at its simplistic is very abstract, these shapes are positive or negative, and from a whole, they make up an image, but when you are zoomed in working these little shapes can get blurred especially with a pattern as detailed as the one I was working. Finally, I did finish carving and I was happy with it overall. Now for the moment of truth, print day. I was nervous printing this, Since I print by hand I was wondering if all the detail would come in or if I carved deep enough for it to show up. I inked up the block and pulled my first print… It was a success! I did find that I needed to put more pressure through the border to get it fully inked but with every print, there are slight adjustments while printing. After printing, I went back and colored two of them with watercolor, and called this print done!

This print was my longest, hardest, most challenging print I've done. and I am glad I pushed myself. When starting I didn’t know fully if I had the skill, it took lots of patience and commitment but at the end of the day( or month :P) I did it!

Looking forward this is something I want to pursue, the one thing I would like to improve is incorporating the pattern or broader with the piece more. Overall I think this accomplishes what I want, to take my prints beyond a more realistic rendering of them in the habitat, and elevate them into something more.

I hope you enjoyed this post and the process around this new piece. Tell me what you think. Do you like this new direction?

Thanks again and I will see you next time,

Bryan.