Building Another House

In about a week or so I need to deliver some work to a show at the Printmaking Center of NJ, and one of those prints is the house shaped print I made last year.  The original was done for a fund raiser show in Belmar, and was kept for a charity auction that has yet to happen.  Luckily, before I donated that piece, I made an identical copy, once again mounting it on a piece of wood with the same shape.  That second copy has been on display in my apartment ever since.  However, I recently noticed that a little piece of the print had bubbled up from the backing.  When the piece was accepted into the show, I knew that I had to deal with this somehow.  I was able to carefully separate the print from the wood along the edge nearest the bubble, and then I re-glued it flat back to the edge.

It has stayed flat, but the glue did cause a little discoloration of the thin Japanese paper it's printed on.  I plan to attempt to repair, or at least disguise these spots, but just in case I can't do that, I decided to make another copy of the print.  Actually this would be a good idea anyway for the same reason mentioned in the first paragraph, in case the copy going to his show doesn't come back to me, I'll still have a properly colored copy.  So today I went to the Studio long enough to pull a proof on the same okawara paper.  This particular block rolls up very quickly, and printing on thin Japanese paper is very easy, so it took longer to clean up than it did to ink and print the block.  Early next week I'll do the coloring.