Sketches of ideas for woodcut – I was inspired by Kathe Kollwitz’s self-portraits and the graphic quality of her prints.
My next step is to use a white grease pencil on black poster paper to see if I can get closer to what the woodcut would look like.
This is the small sample block which I used to determine how much detail I could get in achieving different tonal values in preparation for the larger block.
This is the image transferred to the larger board and repeated with a sharpie to improve the visiblity of the lines. I have begun by isolating the white areas.
At this stage I decided to run a proof to see if I had enough detail around the glasses.
The wood had a deep open grain despite 2 rounds of sanding – the second after my sample block showed the grain of the wood.
I don’t mind a bit of grain as it would break up the large area of black on the right but I think I will head off to Home Hardware to find some wood filler.
Plate with wood filler in the deepest grooves. Hard to work on the wood once you have printed on it. I also did some more cutting.
This was the best I got but needs a lot of filling and more sanding.