Night Falling part 3

I stopped at the Studio on my way home from school.  I taped my proof of the November 2 print to a drawing board, and after it was dry, started coloring.  Molly was there when I arrived, working on some t-shirts for an event that the building is hosting soon.  This led to Brendan (of the building management) stopping by to check the progress on that. He was curious as to what I was doing, and I asked him what impression he got from the piece.  Without knowing anything, he said he felt that the figure in the background was about to do something violent, which fits in with the idea I had and the theme of the show. I'll use some drawing ink tomorrow to touch up the spots near the top of the image, but it looks like I'm done.

Night Falling part 2

The deadline for that Dark of Night show is in a few days, and my decision as to whether to enter it or not comes down to what I can make by then and how I feel about it.  With that in mind, I stopped by the Studio for a little while to continue what I had started a few days ago.   Of the two images I pulled the other day, I decided the one of me dropping off my friend John had more potential than the rain storm, so I moved forward with that one.  The new proof is dry, but I only have the one for now, so rather than risk messing that up, I decided to try a color study on separate paper.  The first step was a quick pencil line sketch of the woodcut (above), and then I got out some watercolors and played around.

The actual background of the scene would be the brick wall of the Glove Factory, and I started with a more realistic color, but then shifted it to something more fiery or bloody.  (scary maybe?)  The print has a lot of black ink in it, so the darks would be darker.  This might work.  I brought it home to look at, and if I decide to proceed, I can color it late tomorrow or early Wednesday.

While I was there, I got a call from Molly.  After looking at our schedules, we decided it might be best to skip a critique this month, and just push it into early October.  The beginning of the school year can be a very busy time.  And I have nothing to show right now anyway.

Night Falling

Been a while since I had some work on display in Belmar, and there's a show coming up next week that I might fit into.  It's called Dark Of Night, and has a theme of night, horror, etc.  I do have two pieces that would be perfect except for that they've both been shown already, which would put them against the exhibition rules, plus my own policy of not showing a work more than once in the same place.

One thing I could do to get around that was go with a Fourth of July piece, and then color it, so it would be a new piece.  One image in particular I thought would work well, but when I stopped by the Studio a few days ago to look for the block, it was one that had been destroyed by Sandy. I did set aside two other possibilities, and a seasonally shortened supermarket schedule allowed me to stop back this afternoon and quickly pull a couple of proofs.  The above prints are April 9th and November 2nd, and I think they could be colored to make them fit the show theme better.  I left them in the rack to dry, and I'll go back and see about coloring them in a few days.

Summer of Cutting

Normally the summer is a time when I expect to get work done on some prints, when I'm not busy with college classes and all that goes with them.  Not this summer.  As mentioned here previously, I took a job with the supermarket which has become a 40 hour per week deal, more than any job I have worked in decades.  Working in the deli, I spend a lot of time cutting meats and cheeses, but no wood has been cut this summer.  My usual Belmar woodcut classes didn't happen for lack of committed students.  I also cut the lawn on a regular basis, though that has been less lately as we have had heat waves and drought conditions most of the summer.  No rain and the grass doesn't grow.

So a lot of cutting, but not the material I know best.  I'd love to get back to it soon.  The supermarket series remains on hold.  I thought a bit about adding to the boardwalk series, but those pieces take a lot of planning before they are ready to start.  But lately I have been thinking about something related to the idea that I have spent recent months cutting everything but wood.  I was at my community college today doing some pre-semester stuff, and had some time to kill between tasks, so I grabbed a sheet of copy paper, a ball point pen, and started sketching a few things.

I took notes on some variations on the theme of cutting, but these early sketches are deli related.  I don't consider these part of the supermarket series, which is specifically about weird but true events, while these are referencing things done all day every day.  There's no practical way to do these from actual observation, so these are memory sketches, and such will be the case if this turns into something.  However, hundreds of hours of slicing does build up a lot of memory.  The above sketch shows meat on the slicer from two different sides.  Below is using a razor bladed box cutter to open a vacuum sealed piece of meat, which is how we quickly get them open.

What I'm thinking right now is this wouldn't be a series, but instead a complex composition mixing pieces of cutting ideas related to this summer.  And probably a colored piece.  If I can expand the idea over the next few weeks, I'll try taking it to the next stage.