Home and Poem Carve

Home again....2 years in painful exile and in pain. The house revisioned, changed

yet the spot to rest remains 

my catalpa stands tall

though scarred

and the wild wooly yard

pushes beloved bulbs

through melting snow

o my dear humble cherished

home!

I signed up for a poem swap---pariticipants were to choose

a poem and carve an image for it.

Much as I love carving, I find these editions

of 20 plus, exhausting, and i think this

will be my last. I think I can do 10 comfortably

maybe even 15 but I'm huffing and puffing

on the way to 26.

I had another poem and another image and started

another carve.... that was more about winter.

But this poem arrived and I sketched something beside it,

with my purple pen.

Then I did a pencil sketch

Then I drew on the block

And here's a test print.

I thought i might carve leaves for the trees...

and stamp the green....but

I don't know, depends on energy

Fire Rats for the New Year

Process, process, this was such an uphill climb. I wanted to make something for the Chinese New Year and I don't know why I had this compulsion. Maybe because I felt I owe rats something, having experimented on them in my youth. I rescued our control group and o! my wonderful parents, as I remember all the critters we housed at
various times.

Or is it my longing for fire. for glassmaking, for what fire enabled me to do. I have yet to figure out how to render fire, how i will add it to the stamped image.

I began by looking at rat pictures. Then I drew several.
But these didn't become the stamp, mainly because the stamps were being created for ATCs and I couldn't think the image small enough, though i did scan them in and shrink them to ATC size......

Finally, a couple came to me to be translated from pencil to Mastercarve and then carved.

 I was surprised that all I had to do was rub the image on the mastercarve and it transferred. Mastercarve is not my favorite material but this ease of transfer is something I will have to remember.

First Exchange of Year Completed

I started working on these angels so long ago. The first Image I created just annoyed me.



i dug the second image and moreover, the carving. It's on linoeleum and since lino was my first, well, since this incarnation, I think I've imprinted on it...

But I couldn't get the pigment stamp pad ink to cover it evenly-- it's too big. so I had to break out the lino ink. So hard (sob)... I hate it when I run no roll smack dab into disability. I can't tell if it is the height or just the mess but being vertical helps you dodge it and having to move myself with the same ink covered hands to then try to stmap the image was incredibly frustraing.


And still I could not get a consistently good print.





So I carved a third angel from an already existing image...... and I couldn't a good print. So I embossed her.
Sigh sigh. not what i wanted, but i mailed the set of 26 in before the deadline.... I need to figure out what to do about ink.... with papermaking, I jsut roll around wet, thus far and since i can't feel it, I'm not annoyed..... maybe when i get home and have a bathroom large enough vs worrying about a rug covered floor, etc... maybe i can try printing again....

Rescued Failure

Conquest and victory are a mosaic composed of defeats. So this failed carving was rethought and I've happily made postcards... another take on this gorgeous Autumn and autmuns past.

I've printed on different media and used markers on one, a surprise to me and on the other two, colored pencils....

Angel Carved

I've carved two angels for the Angel swap. One I like better than the other. It's the one I creaed to be a picture image and then decided to carve. The other I drew in an effort to make an angel, inpsired by the winged cracked egg--- I still want to do that--- of RahXephon.

Anyway, I decided that Angel 2 should be my Holiday Card offering to my family of friends and sought window cards for her. I found none for a long time and finally bought the ones at Walmart.... I actually first sought window cards
for ATCs.

Anyway these window cards for wedding pix, while not the most compelling of frames, does how the Angel, well. And the Angel, p[rinted on the photo paper I got with the printer and never used, printed glossily and easily, leaving an impression far more easily than on the watercolor paper.... hmmm....

Progress and Fun

I received two wonderful postcards for mail art swaps.
They are both so different and so accomplished.

From them I learned that I could use the stamp as the jumping off place
for the image.... okay, I guess it always is...but their use of color
bothe very different, both exciting.....

I would love to show whast I'm nattering on about, but I would have to
get permission to present them in this context.

They were instructive in my creation of the Autumn postcard....
I hope I have enough energy to make them for more than
the swap.

I use colored pencils and wrote a haiku. My trip to Walmart has resotcked me with colored pencils
a medium that is new to me, too. And red pens--- i was using some discarded red pens
the points thicker than i liked. So now i can write a bit more elegantly on the remaining postcards.


I've transferred the new angel to the inovart smoothcut that just arrived. yes i don't like the material but i
needed and block lareger than my 4 by 5 these are 4 by 6 which still cut off some of her wings....

meanwhile i've drawn a bunch of faces toward creating some face carvings and created a double fairy image to carve.

New Tools

The Flexcut micro palm set arrived today and wow! what ease--- 2 1mms , one 1.5 mm and one 2.5 mm...

Where I'd been using the Speedball knife and an exacto, now I have tools that can make the squiggles and remove the tiny bits with a lot less effort.

I've used them immediately to work on one of my angels! So glad I read about them in the Carving Consortium archives. They have made the little locks I was carving, easy.

Lovely little wooden box for them and I like how the wwood feels in my palm.