3 posts tagged “printmaking”
I stumbled across this in an Image aggregator yesterday. It's from an auction catalog. Number 299 of 300 was auctioned off recently. It was predicted to go for 600 Euros, which is on the expensive end for a print. Instead it went for 2600 Euros, which is a testament to how awesome it is. (You could probably buy a fair to middlin Rembrandt for that same price.)
It's a hand printed woodcut from an Austrian artist that I'd never heard of before, Norbertine von Bresslern-Roth (1891 - 1978,) and one of the most stunning prints I've ever seen. I'd love to see one up close. The DeYoung and the Legion of Honor have a lot of other work on hand by the artist, here is the link to their imagebase search:
http://search.famsf.org:8080/search.shtml?keywords=Norbertine
They call Norbertine an "animal painter," but almost all the images, and certainly the most impressive ones, are all linocuts and woodcuts.
So, right on the heels of that prior post...
Last night I mocked up a stylized version of the bee chop sketch in photoshop, just using circles. It is a rough idea of how the finished chop will look when printed. (Except I'll probably print it in red, as tradition dictates.)
I think I may run it through a few variations, because I like the detail of the sketch, I just wonder about its legibility in a smaller size. (Finished carved chop will have a smaller version, about 1 & 1/2 inches square) This simplified version has no trouble with legibility after reduction, and it looks more like a traditional family seal.
The point of this here particular blog is to upload a sketch or doodle or something just about every day. I'm going to try and keep content here pretty regular, which isn't really in my nature, so we shall see, we shall see.
That means that you'll get scans of whatever I'm thinking about or working on at the given time. My other journal was supposed to end up being the sort of "Work in progress" queue that I envision putting up here, but it has taken a sharp turn away from that into well, rambling. Rambling is fine, just not the point in this case.
So. Less chatter. I'm working on a chop to sign my prints with. (A chop is a seal, or a sign, used by printmakers traditionally to let someone know that they made an image, or printed it. Some prints could have three chops on them, the artist, the printer, and the house that the printer works for. My prints, being less than glamorous, have had none till now.)
I've kicked around a couple of ideas, but the one I'm attached to is based on a print I made, of three bees in a triangle. I want to stylize this, until it looks something like a japanese family seal, and then I figure I'll carve it out of wood and print it on the back of my editions.
Here is the sketch I made at work in a meeting (I was supposed to be learning about the quarterly financial outlook. Yawn. Wake me if we go out of business, 'K guys?) that I think nails the idea down pretty well:
