Transcripts
1. Intro: Hey, my name is Dana Feldman. Marry, an artist, a musician living in Northwest Michigan. And today we're gonna talk about Lenora Cook printmaking. I am a self-taught printmaker. I've been doing it for over a decade. I started making minor cut prints in order to make my own album covers. Back in the day. I just kinda fell in love with the process. I loved the meditation of the carving. I love seeing the block inked for the first time. I love the way that your brain asked to wrap around the positive versus negative space in order to make a design come to life. I love the whole thing. I hope to be able to share some of my insights and some of my love of printmaking with you here. Designing for line and put printmaking is a little bit different than designing for other mediums because of some of the particulars of the process of Lenora Cook printmaking. There are some things you have to keep in mind in the design stage. I know it can seem a little bit overwhelming, but we're gonna talk about all of these issues today and get you ready for lineup cut. The project for this class will be a pencil drawing transferred onto a four by six linoleum block, which will then be the design for your linoleum print. The design I'll be using for this class is a pine tree and a moon. I will walk you through all of the hows and whys about this design. You can certainly use your own design for this class or you can base your design off of mine. The last thing we're going to learn how to do is to transfer this drawing onto your linoleum block. So the focus of this class is to learn about the design elements involved in making a line of credit ready design. This design does not, does not, does not, does not have to be a masterpiece. You can think of it more like a map or an outline, kinda like a blueprint for what you're gonna do next. So all you need for Part one is paper. Computer paper is totally fine. Also, a pencil and eraser. I love mechanical pencils for Lehner cut a wooden spoon. And I recommend two different linoleum blocks, one for practice and one for your actual carving. Okay, let's go.
2. Pre-Design Concepts: Okay, Let's talk about some things you need to keep in mind before you start your design. Number 1, most important thing to remember, it's backwards. Backward is backwards. Just like a stamp, everything that you carve is going to be the mirror image of what is printed. So this doesn't matter if it's symmetrical. Same zs. If you are planning on carving text. My thoughts are with you. I think we're actually going to do a whole separate class just on carving texts. So we'll get to that. And so, I mean, this shouldn't affect the way that you're going to design, something like your final design. But it is something that you need to keep in mind as you go through the process. Number 2, most important thing, map out your Canvas. Before you start your design, you need to know where you can design. This is your blank piece of paper. You are going to simply trace around the block that you're going to carve on. Like so. And then you know that anywhere in here is safe to draw. This is going to come in handy later. So there's going to be money points that you get two in this process where you need to make a decision about something. And in my experience, it's best to try and make as many of those decisions as you can in the design process before you get to the actual carving. So Let's talk about some of these things.
3. Positive vs. Negative Space: One of the most important decisions that you need to make in this line of code process is how you're going to handle positive versus negative space. So in 90 cut, positive and negative space are really the only tools that you have to work with. There's no gray areas. It's either positive or negative space. One thing to keep in mind is that often we will draw where we want to carve. And when you're drawing on paper, you are adding pen or pencil to usually a white piece of paper, which means you're adding positive space to an already negative space in my pocket, it's the opposite. The block, by nature is positive. If you link to a whole block, that would be one big positive space. And what you carve out of that is negative. So often, if you're going to carve the line that you just drew, you will be actually carving negative space. Whereas when you drew it and you were drawing the positive space. So let's talk a little bit more about that Example. Okay, let's take this example of this month and I drew it. So I just drew a basic outline of the MAF and some details that I wanted to include. It's a pretty straightforward design. But there's so many decisions that you can make here to come up with completely different end results. For example, you could just part of the actual lines that I've drawn here. Just really straightforward carving all of these details, just following the pencil lines. The other option is you could carve everything except for the pencil lines. That's a little bit more technically difficult, but totally possible. And you could leave the background carved or uncarved. And that would be assuming you're using black ink, that would be either a black background or a white background. So there's lots of different decisions here, and let's show you a couple of different options. Okay, so here is the block in which I just pretty much went ahead and carved the pencil lines. I did also carve out the background. And I left. If you can see some tiny little dots there to be like some little stars in the background. But for the most part, I just followed the pencil lines just as they are in the drawing. And here is the end result of this carving. So as you can see, the positive space is stuff that I have not carved. And by following those simple pencil lines, I've ended up with white details within the moth. And carving out the background gives me a white background. And then leaving these little dots gives me little positive stars. Okay, Here's another way you can go with it. In this example, I carved out everything except for the pencil lines. So I left the details uncarved, meaning those when we positive space. I also left the background uncarved, which means that it will be positive space. In that case, I needed to give it sort of a border. So I kind of made a little, little rounded rectangle shape to encase them off. And I also carves some little stars there to give some texture in the background. And here's the result of this carving. As you can see, it's wildly different than the other one. In this one, the moth is white, kind of giving it an illuminated feel. And the background is very bold. The details are all positive space by leaving them uncarved, which means that I had to go in and carve all the space around there. You can get a little tricky, but we'll talk about that. So as you can see, you can end up with wildly different prints from the same basic design depending on these decisions that you make. And like I said earlier, it's easier to make these decisions while you're in the design process, then when you're already carving where you could run into the mistake of carving away something that you didn't want to. I wanted to show you an example of a time when the positive and negative space can flip on you. And that's when a shape is extended outside of a bordered area. So here I have my dark sky in size this circle, and I have this line extending through it. So in the circle the line is negative space. And when it leaves the circle and has to become positive space in order to differentiate it from the background behind it. And here's the finished product of that. Remember it's backwards, of course. And to the viewer, I think it reads pretty clearly as one line, although it is two very different things here, positive versus negative space. So this is an example of why it's really important to make these decisions when you're designing, before you start carving so you don't run into issues here. So let's talk about this design for a second. There are so many different ways that I parting this. I could carve out the bird, making it a white bird. And which means I would probably want to leave the sky dark. In that case, I could also carve out the moon, making it a white moon, and then leave the tree dark. But then over here I'm going to have to decide how differentiate the tree from the dark sky. I could also carve out the tree, making it an illuminated tree. And I could leave the moon black. I could then carve out the sky. And in that case again, I would have to differentiate somehow, probably with an outline between the tree and the blacks, the whites guy. And then there's a number of different ways to interchange all of those different things. In the next part of this class where we actually carved this design, I will go through a little bit more the decision-making process behind what I'm going to in part on what a knot. And I'm going to show you different ways that we could do this. One simple design. Another thing to keep in mind as you're deciding which of these things to carve is the balance of positive and negative space? Because you only have these two values to work with, It's really important that you find a balance between the two of them. To leave you with a print that doesn't feel too heavy or too light. For example, if you are going to keep the tree positive space, perhaps you want to keep the bird positive spaces as well to kind of counterbalance those two objects and maybe carve out the background to kind of bring those, pop those elements out, but also to not leave the block feeling too heavy. And alternatively, if you were going to carve out the tree and make it positive and negative space, then perhaps you would want to leave the sky dark to bring some grounding back to the block. I don't know, it's all personal preference as well. This could also look really cool just with a bunch of outlines. I think the main thing is just to go into this process with intention and really think about the elements of design before you start carving. So you don't go through all the work of carving and end up with something you don't like.
4. Kinetic Energy: Another thing I like to keep in mind with lineup cut is kinetic energy within the block. This is just personal taste, but I feel like sometimes the block can be kind of heavy on its own because it is just one big, large piece of positive space. And so I like to carve things that have some sort of movement in them in order to bring the block itself to life. One of my favorite things to do in lineup cut is to actually try to become the thing that I'm carving. Try to pretend that I am physically this thing that I'm carving so that I can capture the movement of the pine tree or the leaf that I'm carving. Okay, So that being said, let's go through the ins and outs of this design. First of all, I wanted to add multiple different elements that I could use as positive or negative space. So I've got lots of decisions here. I've got laughed so different ways that this block work. I also wanted to make sure that there was some movement in this tree to kinda counteract like I was talking about before, the static nature of the block itself. So I feel like we've ended up with a pretty solid design that could go in lots of different directions.
5. Transfer to Block: So now you've got your design all ready to go. You've made all these decisions, you've got plans. And now it's time to get this drawing onto this block. Okay, we're going to talk about two different ways to transfer your drawing onto your block. The first way is probably the easiest, although it only is applicable if you don't mind that your final print is going to be backwards, the mirror image of your original drawing. In this case, we are going to use carbon paper. And then remember how we outlined the block originally before we started the design. Well, we're going to use that outline to kind of feel where the block is and make sure it lines up on here. You can even increase it a little if you'd like. And then you just start tracing the CPC. I'll just do a little bit over here and a little bit over here. And it gives you an idea. And there we go. Easy. Okay, the next way to transfer this design takes a little bit more elbow grease, but this way is the only, the best way that I've found to do it if you care which direction your drawing is facing. So for example, if you had texts in here, obviously you would want to use this way because it's important that this is not backwards. Okay, So again, you line up your block with the outline that you drew at the beginning. And here, you really do want to increase it so that this doesn't slip. So creases along all the edges, like so. And then flip it over. Well, I have other design on the back that I'm not going to use. But then you take your fancy wooden spoon and you're just going to burnish. And we wanna do this. I'm going to turn the camera off in a minute so I can really go at it. I mean, you want to, if you know where your design is, one of focus on those fonts really kinda wanna get fall in there. And you want to use a lot of pressure. And make sure I going over it multiple times in different directions. So a little bit, but this way, a little bit this way. And you really need to make sure that this paper isn't moving. So keep your hand here as a support. Don't let the paper move vessels like multiple trees in multiple places. All right. Okay, so after all of that work, Let's see how it looks. Not spectacular, but you know what? This is. Good enough for me to work with. At this point. I've got a basic map of where everything goes. And I'm just going to draw over it with pencil again so that I have more detail back in there. Okay, and now you've got your design. Of course, the other way to do this, if you're super fancy and you have a printer at home is to make a digital image of your, your original design. Use Photoshop or I think even preview does it where you can flip the design and then print that out and then use that with the carbon paper method.
6. Outro: You did it. You did it even though I didn't wait, I go, Congratulations. You have a block ready to car. I hope you found this class fun and informative and helpful. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. In the next class, I will be teaching you how to carve this block. But for now, congratulations, you did a great job. Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll see you when you are ready to color.
Dana Falconberry
