Sketching a Big Piece and Getting Ready to Teach a Workshop

Sketching The Piece

The artist residency is a wonderful event in which artists get to go into an inspiring place and dance with the muses, don't you think?  Residencies are one of the better ways to engage in artistic development and have uninterrupted dedication to the arts. For all that I am grateful every day of this residency and truly thank the Red Rock Canyon Interpretive Association for affording me this unique opportunity.

As you can tell, I'm having the time of my life. I have sketched now about 8 little blocks ranging form small to smaller and am planning a large piece or two. If you have visited my Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/1000woodcuts), then you know I have enough reference material to last until next year. The desert in the spring is truly inspiring.

Even if I had not signed an agreement that requires a donation and a workshop, I would be looking for ways to give something back. So, of course, I'm planning a puzzle print!

Here is a sketch on two 16" x 20" panels, total size of the woodcut will be 16" x 40". I always print a few color and black and white photos to aid in the sketching.
The plan being, I carve the background mountains, one of the most encompassing views of the Red Rock Canyon proper area.

The puzzle pieces will reside inside the valley and will be carved by my workshop participants, which is the other way that I'm giving something back to the place that is giving me so much.

I am going to place them in a quilt-like arrangement within the valley area, and will print all the tiny prints in one pass after gluing them securely. The background will be printed in another pass and I will probably hand color the resulting print (I have become enchanted with hand-coloring my woodcuts as of late!).

The finished woodcut print and the block will be donated to my benefactors and will become part of the BLM/Red Rock Interpretive Association collection. How cool is that?!

 

The Workshop

I am giving two workshops, one Sunday the 13th and another Saturday the 19th, which happens to be Red Rock Day! Info flyer at the end of this post.

I spent the better part of yesterday and this morning assembling everything for my brave participants. I like to provide everything so that everyone gets totally addicted to doing woodcuts. I use my own workshop instruction handout to make sure I have everything I need.

The woodcut kit is composed of: Starting at the top left and going clockwise: my handout with quick instructions, a printing tool I call a wood-button baren, pencil and marker for sketching, a door-knob printing tool, set of carving knives, paper for printing, woodblocks, a carving "bench" made of fiberboard and molding with no-slip lining, walnut ink for tinting the block and a foam brush, two demo blocks, ink slab (wax paper on foam board), ink, brayer and knife. Ready, set, go!

And the workshop info:

A Day in the Backcountry

Quiet!

On my fourth hike of the residency in Red Rock Canyon and surrounding areas, I headed off into the backcountry. The Black Velvet road is a less visited area, at least by the larger crowds. It is frequented by mountain bike riders and trail runners, so I'm told.

I posted more pictures here:
https://www.facebook.com/maria.arango.diener

The trail was mine all mine, with a couple of young bike riders passing me in a hurry. Here are some of the musings I wrote upon my return.

Musings

Last hike at the pine creek, I was surrounded by the sounds of the birds scratching into the dirt, calling each other, rustling the leaves high in the pines. Today, the few birds are distant and my footsteps silence their calls, warning each other of approaching danger. I'm not dangerous, I call out and am answered by more silence. A road runner clacks his beak as he scurries across the trail but too quickly for the camera. As I follow his path, a huge hare stands tall, ignores the road runner but, ears awind, sees me and takes a few hurried steps toward safety. I decline the invite to follow; when I get to where it had disappeared it would be long gone anyway.

The narrow trail is easy to follow and devoid of rocks allowing me to keep my gaze high on the surrounding red striped peaks, enjoying the mottled sandstone and savoring the lure of the distant canyons. There! Where the two polka dot skirts meet the Velvet desert, there is where the desert calls from. Another canyon, lush with vegetation as it climbs the path of the seasonal descending water. Steep climb among boulders, oak and spruce hanging on to the vertical sides and shading the lush guarded life.

 
At the top, the gift of another endless view sitting on a boulder slapped by the cool breeze and listening to the sound of my tired breath. Later I return to the trail, grudgingly. I am regaled this time with the delicate cream flowering yucca and just when I begin to marvel at that and the sunny yellow daisies against the purple desert sage, I spot the unbelievable magenta color of the prickly pear blooms.

Sunday I teach a workshop and will report on that awesome adventure!

Doodles to prints

I am fully engaged now in the creation of the next collaborative puzzle print, which as some of you know, I am launching as a Kickstarter.com project so that we get funded properly this time.
Once I launch I will update that project on my alter-blog http://puzzleprints.blogspot.com
but we're not there yet although so close I'm starting to shake a little.

While awaiting for the final approval process and the final touches on my part, I continued to work on the image which will be the awesome Fantastic Garden with the help of 80 printmaking friends. My creative assignment is to come up with something simple, puzzle-like, to be divided into as many pieces as there will be participants for them to give the image life.

The design has to be simple so I started by looking at my collection of royalty-free clip art and came up with some doodles. I felt like I had stepped into a toon-world of some sort with images of fat-funny bees and rounded flowers floating in my head.

But I couldn't stop there! No, once fully engaged I had to keep doodling. For that, I use Photoshop and my Bamboo tablet with a very responsive pen! I took the birds and flipped them, scaled the tree, added more pond, and some critters under the tree roots. I don't know about anyone else, but those "doodles" take a bit of your life away. I think artists live so long because we turn half an hour into seven, or more accurately, we shrink seven hours of doodling into what seems like 30 minutes, thus "living" 6 and a half free hours during which we don't age at all. It's a theory, no?!

Anyhow, one thing led to another and I came up with the final image, to be modified several more times of course. Here it is, the soon to be Fantastic Garden. Imagine it larger than life 60 x 44 inches in four panels! And all those empty spaces will be filled with my fellow artists' contributions! How awesome is this going to be?!

But of course I couldn't stop there! Not now with all the creative juices flowing like mad...so I thought wouldn't it be super-cool to make some woodcuts from the design with more detail and stuff?! Why not, I have to wait for the participants to cut their blocks anyway, might as well be making art.

So I took the next step and kept on drawing and coloring. I have to say that I don't usually work this way at all but this is a lot of fun. My usual modus operandis is to draw right on the block and take it from there. But this time I'm planning everything ahead.

So here we are after two days of working, the evolution of a little panel which is likely to become one of the rewards for the future backers of the project!

The creative process is kind of cool, I think, things just happen and we artists seem to step out of our mind and body while "something" takes over and doodles away.
This one is called "Tree and a Bee". Should make a cool woodcut.

I better keep working!