If It's Raining, It Must Be Tuesday

I can't explain why it rains so often on Tuesdays that I teach woodcut, I just know that it does.  And it usually starts late in the day, just as I'm loading stuff at home and bringing supplies for class into the Boatworks.  Luckily they are letting me keep a lot of stuff in the building now for the duration of my class, so just one trip to load the car, and few things to risk getting wet.  Rain all around the state most of the day, though very little in the shore area until around 5 pm.  The result was an overabundance of parking around out building.  My student with the longest trip down had informed me that she couldn't make it, but the other four all showed and it was another busy night.  Above, Dawn and Lauren spend the night printing their blocks, pulling many usable proofs.

Dawn had pulled a decent proof of her octopus block last week, but today came with a supply of scrapbook paper in a variety of designs (an option I had mentioned in week 1) and after making a few modifications from last week's block, printed half a dozen all different from each other.  Above are the first three proofs.

Lauren had been working on her first block since early in the summer.  Early on she was doing a lot of it with just an x-acto knife but she finally relented and bought some real tools to use between class meetings.  Above are three of the first four proofs of her block, on Rives Heavyweight, Rives Lightweight, and Kinwashi, all very consistently printed.  (click on the image to see the details)

Marie requested a new piece of wood and started cutting, but toward the end of class put that aside to pull two proofs of her block from last week.  She put these on a heavier print paper than last week's test proof, with the intention of going back in with watercolor.

The trickiest thing for everyone was figuring how they would get all their new prints back to their cars without them getting overly wet from the rain.  Sadly, just one more meeting in the current series and then we take a break while my college schedule is sorted out.  but I expect that some of my students will put prints in upcoming show of work from participants in BAC workshops.