cutout
March 10, 2010
For a woodcut.
Posted by jodi on March 10, 2010 at 7.05pm
studio video march 3
March 3, 2010
Posted by jodi on March 3, 2010 at 7.34pm
studio video!
February 27, 2010
Today’s video was supposed to be cutting a woodblock, but the wood gouges were forgotten at the Monastery. So instead, more drawing.
I’m trying out a new method for counting lines: instead of counting in my head how many lines are drawn in each section and adding up all of those numbers, I’m making a tally of every group of five lines. This way maybe I can watch cartoons on the laptop while I draw, or talk with Peter on Skype (will try it out tonight and see if the drawing and the conversation interfere with one another). Five is a number I can feel with my hand instead of keeping it in my head. I think.
Yes, I am listening to Ozzy Osbourne while I work. I realized while drawing today that I added Ozzy’s “Bark at the Moon” to my blip.fm playlist more than once; not sure what that reveals about me but there you have it (full disclosure: I have the LP too). A song, of course, is only as good as its bridge, and as you can hear in the video. . . well. Other cheesy songs I’m embarrassed to admit I like but which can probably be found more than once on my blip.fm playlist include Peter Murphy’s “Cuts you up” and Murray Head’s “One Night in Bangkok”. Don’t judge.
Posted by jodi on February 27, 2010 at 6.53pm
in progress
February 22, 2010
A terrible photo, but you get the idea; a few of the drawings from last week. These will all have layers of woodblock printing on top of them. Of course.
They’re not meant to go together but I kind of like them stacked like this now that I see them together.
Posted by jodi on February 22, 2010 at 9.57pm
studio video february 16 2010
February 16, 2010
Drawing: concentric circles
Listening to: Dresden Dolls No, Virginia. . .
I love the way the scraping sound comes through on the video when I wipe the gloppy ink buildup off the pen into the notebook. The post-it note stuck on the drawing is for counting and keeping track of how many lines are drawn. In the background you can see my handy if not very pretty circular knitting needle storage system: gathered by their cables in a hair elastic, hung on the drapery cleat in the window trim.
The drawing goal for this week is to get a first layer of ballpoint pen drawing down on 22 half-sheets of Rives BFK brought home for the purpose (half sheets because they need to fit in a suitcase to be taken back up North where they’ll be finished). I wanted to add some colour to them but the watercolour paints were left behind in North Bay, so that gratification will be delayed. Of course these will all eventually have woodblock prints on top of them as well. Because horror vacui is my middle name, y’all.
The week’s other big task: cleaning up the Chandler & Price guillotine trimmer with a wire brush to prep it for painting. The base needs to be painted before the top can be bolted back on, and the whole thing needs to be reassembled before we can get down to the very important business of Chopping Books. Once this puppy is back on its feet I may make a summer project of chopping up whatever books are on hand, just for fun.
Posted by jodi on February 16, 2010 at 1.31pm
ten thousand tiny lines
February 14, 2010
I never would have thought there were so many had I not counted them all myself.
Posted by jodi on February 14, 2010 at 4.42pm
studio video february 3 2010
February 5, 2010
Yep, still drawing on the same piece. I brought it to the Monastery so I could draw on my office desk before class and during my office hours. There’s a new one in progress on the bedroom floor, just waiting for all of the housemates to leave town (they’re all education students, so they’ll be away on placements for the next seven weeks) so that I can spread the drawings out on one of the communal tables and work in comfort.
Posted by jodi on February 5, 2010 at 2.13pm
first studio video of 2010!
January 31, 2010
A cup of tea, a pile of pens, the Cocteau Twins. Slow, meditative lines going nowhere. Thinking about a lot of things; trying to think about nothing.
Posted by jodi on January 31, 2010 at 5.12pm
studio day
January 23, 2010
Cutting a new woodblock:
This wood, a cheap Douglas Fir ply, was great for wood intaglio (which is what I bought it for) but is not so hot for carving normally. It’s brittle and splitty and kind of a pain in my arse. And in my wrist, which I may need to wrap up tonight. This could be slow going. And when I pick up the wood for my printmaking students to use, I’ll get them some nice birch instead.
I poked around the shop a bit and had a look at the litho equipment that was donated to the school last year. It’s pretty much a full litho shop’s worth of stuff: press, graining sink, stones, scraper bars, chemicals, lots of tusche and crayons and other supplies. The shop isn’t set up yet and the graining sink can’t be used, but I’m thinking about getting one of the stones out and trying to do some printing without graining first. It’ll all depend on whether I find any lithotine once I get my hands on a key to the locked fire cabinet, but everything else I’d need seems to be there. Everything but a forklift to heave the stone I want to use up onto the press, of course. I think it would take six of the biggest students to lift it, and it’s got to come up from almost floor level. Bonus marks won’t be enough incentive, I’m thinking.
It looks like a pretty good press:
There were also some nice old inks in the cupboard that I don’t think I’ll open, as the older they are the more likely they are to be filled with carcinogens. Many were date stamped January 1989 but these two on the left here, the Ault & Wiborg ones, are dated Oct 27 1964 (red label) and Feb 22 1957. Neither has ever been opened.
![canadian fine color [sic]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2699/4299501790_847a55dd31_o.jpg)
No, the orange ink is not from 1542.
I don’t think I ever told y’all this story about those other old inks, the ones I got from the shelf marked “oldies” at Green Street, the oldest of which is dated October 1971 (two months older than me!). I received an email from someone who had seen my photos of the inks on flickr, inquiring what I was planning to do with the inks and whether I’d consider selling them. I wrote back and said that I was going to print with them, because I thought it would be kind of funny to use ink that was older than me (in the same way I remember my housemates and I back in 1989 thinking it was so hilarious when one of us, not me, tasted some of that army food in the silver packets that was older than we were and had been sitting around in storage somewhere), and just out of curiosity what did he want the inks for? He wrote back that he was a lawyer working on a case for a group of individuals who had contracted cancer from working with inks in that era and please under no circumstances should I use the inks. Of course I immediately told him that in that case he was welcome to the inks as long as he would deal with the rigmarole of getting them back into the States, as by that time I had finished grad school and brought all of my stuff, including the purloined heirloom inks, back to Canada. I never heard back. Which makes it not much of a story really, except for the whole inks = cancer thing. So now the cans sit untouched up high on a shelf in my studio, looking pretty with their 30 years of label design, and this story is added to my vast arsenal of stories I use to try and scare my students, along with the one starring yours truly who used to cook curried black eyed peas in a pot on the hot plate in the intaglio room at Bealart, right next to people who were cooking asphaltum onto plates. So, curried black eyed peas with added tar, wax and mineral spirits, essentially. That’s some tasty stuff right there.
Posted by jodi on January 23, 2010 at 11.03pm
blue skies
January 21, 2010
It was an insanely fine day here in this little corner of the Great White North. Here, have a look:
Yup, that’s the same old path up the same damned hill AGAIN. One of these days I’ll walk somewhere else, I promise. And when I do, I’ll be sure to photograph the snow over there for y’all. I’m quite certain it will look TOTALLY DIFFERENT and Not At All Boring.
I don’t teach again until Monday afternoon, and as we’ll be critiquing a drawing assignment and then having another session with the live model, I don’t really need to do any planning for it. I’ll still be heading in to the school over the weekend, however; there are a couple of shiny new woodblocks waiting in my office and I’m looking forward to getting started cutting on them. I’m also planning to poke around the print shop a bit and get a better look at what letterpress equipment is in there, and think about what sorts of projects I might be able to do while I’m here. Then there’s that whole lithography shop worth of equipment and supplies that’s been recently donated to the school and hasn’t even been fully set up for use yet, and it’s pretty damned tempting to try and start working on a stone, since I wouldn’t have to worry about getting in the way of students with it. If I don’t get too caught up in all of that, I’m going to try and spend a bit of time working up a drawing for my next tattoo (which I’m planning to get while I’m here in North Bay) featuring one of these cute little fellers:
Posted by jodi on January 21, 2010 at 9.21pm
