Reduction Addiction

My mom has recently become addicted to reduction cut relief printing. She tried relief printing a couple of years ago to create Christmas cards for our printmaking group's card exchange, and while she didn't hate it, it didn't really grab her. We recently had homework to do an insect print, and I'd had a grasshopper photograph that Mom really wanted to try doing a reduction cut of. Here's her process:

Materials: Safety Kut Block 5 3/8" x 4"
Speedball #1 Lino Cutter Assorted blades
Speedball 4" Soft Rubber Brayer
Speedball Water Soluble Block Printing Inks

Step 1: draw picture on tracing paper and rub onto Block
Step 2: remove white highlights and print with a mix of white plus #3045 yellow

Step 3: remove leaf veins and light yellow grasshopper parts and print with a mix of white plus #3412 dark yellow

Step 4: cut away yellow grasshopper parts and print with a mix of #3404 green, #3045 yellow, and #3412 dark yellow

Step 5: cut away all green parts and print with a mixture of #3406 brown, #3407, and #3408 violet

Moth Study

I've been entertaining myself by submitting ID requests into the BugGuide.net (a great volunteer, mostly expert amateur, resource to identify all sorts of insect and insect-like critters) to find out what insects I've been taking pictures of.

While one of my favourites remains:

not the least of which reason is the name: golden dung fly (honestly, that says it all); but I also submitted a lovely-patterned moth photo:

which turned out to be a type of Sphinx Moth, and I wanted to do something with it.

Being more interested in the print and the result rather than spending time on the drawing (I'm lazy - that's normally how I work for prints), I traced the photo onto onion skin (very thin, lightweight tracing paper) then rubbed the tracing onto my piece of Safety Kut. Then it was just a matter of carving those delicate little lines.

This first print is just one colour (Faust AquaLine water soluble relief ink, using a lot of transparent base to very little pigmented ink, to get a nice, transparent feel to the print) on natural Kitakata paper, and the image size (for all of them) is about 3 1/5"x 5".

The second print is the same, with a little bit of darker ink rolled onto the body & tips of the wings.

The last print is the darker ink on Thai Chiri Kozo paper which has then been wet-mounted onto grey Rising Stonehenge.

While the photos really don't do the images justice (they flatten the texture and sheen of the papers), they give you at least some idea of what the print looks like. I am particularly happy with the print on the Thai Chiri Kozo - that really helps the moth to hide out on the paper, which is exactly what I was hoping for.

As for mounting, I know I didn't do it exactly right, but it has been done with archival media (nori paste), and it looks pretty good (although I screwed up one, darn it). It would be so much easier to do this with a press, but there ya go.