Terraplane Blues part 9

 Time to get back to my Terraplane block, a week after the last time I worked on it.  In that time I did a bit of research and a lot of looking at the block, so I knew exactly what I wanted to do when I had a chance to work on it again.  For example, I figured out what the spot near the bottom middle was by looking at one of source photos for the car.  It's a piece of the odd front bumper that kind of wraps around the car from the front to the sides.  The front of the bumper is set back a bit from the front grill, so not visible in my drawing.  In a color piece I would use that to deal with it, but this is black and white, so I just have value to make use of.  Luckily I can do a lot with relative value.  So instead of making the bumper silvery to represent chrome, and the body a bold color typical of these cars, it's all black and white or an optical gray.  

So I brought the block and good tools to the Studio today, along with home burned disc of songs from the Wipers, 20 favorite tracks from the initial existence of the band- 1978 to 1988.  (read about it on this blog in July 2019)  The Wipers are one of those bands that I associate with particular times and places, such as my times at Montclair State and Southern Illinois, and it can bring me there.  However I made this disc to bring to Texas, but never listened to it there, so this music does not make me think of that time or place.  No matter where you are, it's good music.

Music on, I went to work cutting my block.  Besides the piece of the bumper, I did a little more in the engine compartment, and then the male figure, busily working on the car's engine.  The music wasn't done yet, so went ahead and cut the top line of text, finishing that.  The fact that I do all the text backwards seems to impress a lot of people (once again brought up by many who came to the Open Studio a few weeks ago), but as I always say, I've done so much backwards text that I can block print backwards as fast as I can forwards, and when it comes to cutting, a shape is a shape is a shape.  The practice I got doing names of saints in my Everyman series probably helped as much as anything.  Results from today can be seen below:

It looks like all I have left in this first round of cutting is the rest of the text.  After that, I print it up and see what I have.  If I like the results, I declare it done and move on to the next project.