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Friday, May 21, 2010

My Process

I thought I'd share a little behind the scenes of what goes into my illustrations. 

Everything starts as a sketch, usually a pretty small one, that is scanned, enlarged and flipped in Photoshop.  The printmaking process is in reverse, so to save my sanity I simply flip it backwards in Photoshop and print it out to transfer to my blocks.  It can be a little tricky wrapping my brain around the reserve image, as you'll see later!

Some prints I carve everything on one block and print the entire block.  For this image, I decided to create the image in a series of 'stamps'.  For the background, I cut a little square and used a stencil of the owl.  After that I created belly stencil and did the flower print.  The owl and words were also created with as stamps and printed on the image. 

Here you can see the print before the owl.  If you missed the print, you can see it here:

Now, printmaking may see like a scary process - but there is an 'undo' button.  If I make a mistake I simply carve out the part and make a stamp that replaces it.  As in the 'a' that I carved the wrong way. So there you have, one way I make my artwork. 

2 comments:

  1. I have always admired your work, and this little inside look was very informative. The finished piece in the post below is wonderful.

    Thanks for sharing!

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  2. Thanks for posting this - I love learning artists' processes!

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