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Pooh Sticks Print In Progress



In the past few weeks, I've been low on time in the studio for one reason or another (mainly health and writing commitments related!) but I've learnt over the years that a limit of time does not necessarily mean a limitation on creativity! If I have a 2-hour window after a day in front of the computer I find the constraint helps me to focus my mind and often allows me to settle into my creativity faster than if I have a whole day in the studio.


Last Wednesday evening I was faced with such a situation and I decided I would make a card for my mum for Mother's Day. The simple brief has since turned into something more elaborate!


So my mum got her card, which was a small one-colour woodcut print of my brother and his family playing pooh sticks. I was happy with the result. I had envisaged something quite choppy and rustic, perhaps it takes a little effort to make out what the image is, but the visual pleasure is garnered from those bold cut marks in the wood. I've since refined the image further, using smaller cut marks to interpret the dappled light of the woodland in the background. I intend to produce a small edition of this print on my beloved Awagami Kitakata paper. If you're interested in this print feel free to email me at takahashiprints@gmail.com and I will let you know when it's available.




A few days ago I revisited the original sketch in my sketchbook. Although the little one-colour print did what I set out to do, I felt there was more that could be done with this composition. So I'm now deep in the midst of trying to plan for a 3 colour, multi-block print. This is when I cut a separate block for each colour, and then print the three prints in layers to create the image. I think the multi-block is going to be a linocut rather than a woodcut, as I want to get lots of interesting patterns and textures, and that's alittle easier to achieve in lino.



I'm intrigued by how stylised the foreground is; all the patterns I made when I was playing with the pencil, to depict the swirling water and plants. I feel this approach can be taken up into the trees behind the figures, and this is what I want to try to do in the larger print. In the original woodcut, the marks in the trees were less considered and more freeform.



Here's another version of the print rendered in coloured pencils - a limited palette of blue, yellow and grey, with the blue and yellow overlapping to make green in some areas. I thought the spring colours would be perfect but as soon as I did this I thought 'no!' The colours aren't right - too acidic, and I just feel it's the wrong palette, even if I use earthier shades of yellow and blue. Something in my gut says red/green/grey now....but that doesn't mean my feelings won't change again!!



Here's a drawing I'm now working on. I had an idea in the dead of night to extend the composition into a long thin affair.... but the bending shadows in the water aren't convincing and I'm fairly certain I need to change that. But I quite like the idea of the marks getting more and more abstracted as you move further away from the figures. I'm contemplating turning the baseball hats into generic straw hats to make the image feel more timeless. The colours are still wrong but they're getting closer; this drawing was made with some Kuretake brush pens I bought in Tokyo last winter - they are absolutely gorgeous to work with and I think I might get some more for designing prints with. They're transparent so layer in a similar way to printmaking ink. The way they make lovely expressive broken marks make them areal pleasure to work with for plein air sketching too - drawing from direct observation is great practice and a valuable source of new ideas for prints.


So that's where I'm at for now! This being a new blog post of this kind - it's a little scary sharing half baked ideas without knowing whether this print will work in the long run or now. But hey we're all friends, aren't we? Wish me luck and if you don't hear about this print again, you'll no doubt be able to figure out why!!


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