Summer oh so close....

So woodblocks are proving to be hazardous to my health. My fingers are covered in plasters as I have cut myself and skinned my fingers numerous times over the past few days. Ironic that my print is all about pain!

These prints were to be based on our own personal experiences, a story from our lives that are significant to us.  I decided to base mine on the relationship between me and my brother Gary when we were growing up.  We did everything in our power to cause each other immense pain....and I think I won that battle! 

On one such occassion, and it's probably the earliest thing I can remember doing to him, we had been playing "Hairdressers" with our teddy bears.  I was the hairdresser and he was the customer.  I got a little distracted and totalllllllyyyyy by accident, cut his hand open with a scissors between his thumb and finger.  To this day I still remember throwing the scissors across the room and running for my life while he screamed and blood pumped from his hand.  I cant remember getting in trouble for it so I'm thinking i'm too traumatised about the whole thing to remember it!  But sur where were they going giving two barely 4yr olds a pair of scissors?

So I began by picking my image.  I decided to keep it simple and just feature a pair of scissors surrounded by the word "Ouch".  Was originally going to say "Fuck!" as I thought it more effective as always but sur we were only small and totes wouldnt have been saying bad words ;)

These yokes are a bitch to carve.  So you can imagine my delight when I had finished carving this out and realised that i had done it wrong.  I had forgotten to reverse the letters of "OUCH".....so I had to start again.  Mega Sadface :(

So after doing it the right way round, I marked in with black pin, what I wanted to leave and what I wanted to cut out.  I then inked this up and transfered the image on to a second wood block for the second colour of the print.

I also marked into this one what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to take away.  Thankfully this one didnt take as long to carve as I didnt have to be too careful with the image. 

I inked up this second block in a red colour for the blood.  I began by printing up the main image first and putting this on afterwards even though I probably should have done it the other way around seeing as normally you would print from light colours to dark.

And this is what I finished up with.  I need an edition of 6 that are practically identical and this is proving harder than i thought.  Its quite hard to get the registration of the second block correct over the first print so they're coming out a tad off and also the board is pissing me off on purpose and keeps slipping when going through the press. 

As well as this part of the project, I'm still working on the other aspects of my project.  My silk screen prints still are being slowly destroyed and repaired while I try to think of the best way to display them for assessments next week.

Resorting to throwing food dye at them!











I had done some screen prints of my hand using a grey ink and it didnt come out great.  I thought it was hard to make out what the image was so I decided to make it harder and tore the whole lot up and sewed them all together to form one print which I think works better than leaving them as individual prints.

Summer almost here so just have to get through these last assessments and then I can finally do NOTHING! :D