Twould really take it outta your fingers like...

So still playing with my Pope (scuse the choice of language) and its really starting to go well I think.

In my last post I was picking my composition for the actual woodblock.  The evil Pope got twisted and changed over the weekend till I was left with these two compositions.

The first image is purely just my evil pope with the word "PREY" overhead.  This is just a little play on words, it can mean several things.  When you hear the word, you think of worship, church etc.  But on seeing it, thoughts of preying on people for money or preying on children as the case may be, also spring to mind.

The second image is based on the idea of a King, Queen or Jack playing card.  It has 2 sides, in this case evil and good.

But I thought that the first showed my idea better so thats the one I went with.

The image had to be then transferred on to a woodblock.  Using tracing paper (which we were very excited to find that they actually now stocked that in the Material Store! ---- us arties are sad human beings :P ) I transferred the image using pen to leave an impression on the block.

With transferring and printing, you have to make sure that any text you have in your image is reversed so that it comes out the right way when its printed....or you will cry. Believe me, I've carved many a thing in the past only to realise when nearly finished and having to start again.

The next step was to carve the image into the block with mah shiny new tools...again, we get very excited when we get new arty stuff to play with.

After the carving was done and the feeling officially gone from the tips of my fingers, I was ready to proof it.  I decided to do whats known as a reduction print.  With this, you start by carving out everything you want to be white.  Then you apply the first colour, which is always the lightest colour.  In my case this was yellow.

Once all the yellow prints are printed, I'll carve away what was yellow and then apply my next colour which is red, before doing the same again and then applying black which is my final and main colour.

So I rolled yellow ink on to the block and then placed the block and paper on to the press.

The block is covered with a blanket, then sent in under the massive heavy plate to be printed.  Pull the big arm and voila! Print is made.

The next step of making my edition will be harder as I have to make sure the block is correctly registered so that my next two colours fit in directly where I want them...could be fun :P

And before I go...

;)