A Class By Herself

Last week, one of my woodcut students told me that she'd have to miss this week because of a family commitment.  When I saw Mary at Monday's critique, she offered to just stay home so I would not have to come in tonight just for her.   Of course I told her I'd be there for class as usual.  First of all, I've already been paid and I always honor my contracts.  Second, I wanted to see where she'd be going with this new process she had learned.

She had told me she'd be attending a workshop about Japanese style woodcutting, but when she returned, she talked about learning about the Provincetown style, which is a white line technique.  Last week during our class she cut a white line image of a large leaf as the first step.  She started tonight by cutting a border.  A piece of heavy print paper was tacked to one edge of the block, outside the cut area.  Instead of the printing inks she's grown used to over the past year and a half, she started applying watercolor with a brush (see above), slightly thinned from tube strength, coloring one small piece at a time.  After brushing the watercolor on one small section, she lowered the paper and rubbed the back (see below) with her favorite rubbing tool.  She repeated this process for the rest of the class.

When she stopped to pack up her supplies, she had gotten as far as what you can see below- that's the block on the right and the current state of the print on the left.

The texture of the printed watercolor is rough-mottled and granulated, but that fits well with nature of the image.  This effect will make it work very well to reproduce the color variations through the whole leaf, assuming she goes with the colors in the photo she showed me on her phone.  I don't know if it would work as well with her figure/building images, but I guess we'll see, if she continues to enjoy this variation.  Toward the end of class she asked me if this process would still be considered woodcut.  I told her as far as I was concerned, it is.  A block has been cut, and the lines cut into the block are part of the image.  The inking may be unconventional, and would never be able to be called a true edition, but the print wouldn't exist except for the cut image, and to me that means it's a woodcut.