** Learn How To ** Create a Woodblock Print with Laura Boswell | Printmaker

this is a Japanese woodblock so this is a different technique that I studied out in Japan and it uses this is a sheena plywood it's a soft plywood traditionally it was I'll show you a traditional block so back in the days of hocus I and the Japanese printers we tend to see it it would have been cut in cherry wood and this is how a traditional Japanese print would look I use plywood because I work in very short limited editions and the difference about this technique is that it uses watercolor paint and the watercolor paint is mixed with this gloopy stuff this is rice and the rice blends with the paint to make a nice smooth printing medium and that's all done with brushes and not with a roller so because I work with a brush I can have several printing books on one piece of wood and then I'm just applying the paint to the particular one as I work so with this technique it's it's quite clean today as you can imagine and there's lots of soft mixes so this particular print I was printing earlier so this is one that I was printing working on this morning it's not quite finished but you can see how the colors are very soft and that's one that's even less finish this so you've actually done the three stages of the design or the wrong piece of ply yeah that's right so what you're looking at here is the sky I haven't got the blocks for the moon here but you can see the sky there and there's the large area not gray at the bottom so when I say rice what I mean is it's just rice flour boiled up with water and think of it like old-fashioned wallpaper glue the flower and water glue or for papier-mache and the job of that rice is to smooth the paint to make it sticky and to fix it onto the paper when you print if you put just watercolor on wood you just have a sort of wet smear whereas if you blend it with the rice it becomes a nice study printing medium yes you put paint onto the block and you follow it with about the same amount of rice and think of these brushes almost like a massage brush so they're blending the paint and rice on the block and sweeping across to give you a smooth result and then the paper goes on top of the wet paint and then instead of a printing press you have one of these this is called a baron and it rubs the back of the paper and it's made of bamboo inside there there's a coil of plaited bamboo and that's what gives me our means of taking an impression so it's a very gentle process you don't need a great big printing press or anything like that because everything's down and sticky anyway so you don't need a lot of passion and what tools would you use for cutting the the wood out so for the housing totem I am stop hopping between the two with my liner these are my traditional Japanese tools here so some of them are very very similar to a liner cut tool in the shape of them so here I've got here's a linocut tool and here's the Japanese cutting tool and you can see they're both new gouges for gouging out the big difference for cutting a Japanese would look are these short knives here and these cut the outline of the block and these are called a hankie hang Guiteau Pengy toe and they fit in the fist like that so instead of cutting as we cut in the West where you push away a hanky toe comes towards you so you're either cutting with the knife like that or you're cutting that way on with the back of the knife and the whole point of using a knife like that is to create a block where the sides the top is narrower than the base so that the block slopes outwards so it's very sturdy and also when you're printing you get a nice clean print so the first cut you make is to cut right round the outline with these and you can maybe see that they're sharpened in slightly different ways so this one is for cutting fine detail this one will only cut straight lines so you have a selection of knives that will do different things for the outline when you use them and once the outline is cut then it's a matter of clearing all you need is clearance around the block for the spare paint to go so the other thing you need with a Japanese woodblock is the registration to line the print art and that's actually cut into the wood at the same time as you cut the block so you can maybe see there are these called kento think of them like little shelves to prop your printing paper on and they consist of the right-hand corner and then about three quarts of oil on the print less another shelf so this edge here dictates how far your printing paper goes across and these two shelves here hold it at the right so even when I'm working on a print I've worked on prints that are well over a meter across I'm still using two little registration points that size they're just a really long way apart so you don't need more than two for that and how'd you get your design onto here because I know when you do a reduction for lino you'll starting with an original design and taking away from that so every all your original foundation for your design is already there so how do you get your designs onto the onto the wood so I use a method where I have a master design and then I make a master tracing of that design and I cut my tracing paper bigger than the design I cut it the size of the design plus our margin so white margin to go around the edge of the print light is printed and then I'm I'm transferring the design onto the wood with carbon paper good old-fashioned office carbon paper and at the same time I'm using the edges of my tracing paper to mark my registration so every time I move and push map house a new block from the master tracing I'm also marking where the edges of the paper are so my printing paper is the same size as my master tracing so that it too is going to fit into those blocks as I move it around so you can fit a lot of blocks or two a piece of wood and you can maybe see this very messy one or my registration down here for the different blocks and this is these bits of tape to make sure that I put the right paper in the right Holmes here so each one of these pieces has a different registration point person how many prints could you get from just one piece of firm of wood like this so this is this this plywood this is professional-grade Sheen apply and you could get oh I would think several hundred if you were careful with that you're not putting a lot of pressure on the wood and if it's the professional blade the braids the Blues are very very good so so I would say you could pry me neither Minh straighten block so I must have printed a couple hundred times whereas this one this original cherry block here as as would have been used in the eddo period with this one you could maybe get to a couple of thousand prints because in those days there was no limited edition it was all about mass printing so this cherry is very good for that is hard and it will give you that but I work in limited edition so after 20 after I've printed my edition of maybe 20 prints I'll burn the wood so I never keep the blocks you'd burn the wood yeah I just burned the blocks when I finish suppose I don't cut them into precious cherry employers well that ensures that they're definitely a limited edition I don't have the storage for them and I'm kind of like the RSPCA I like them to go to good homes and then I move on to the next thing so I don't okay very attached to things but with the lino as you can see here I'm destroying as I'm working so with this one it's a reduction and I'm chopping away each time [Music] [Applause] [Music] Hey [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Arnolds Attic

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Rating: 4.8461537 out of 5

Keywords: how to, tutorial, wood printing, laura boswell, printmaker, printer, printing, upstairs gallery, berkhamstead, japanese printing, japanese wood block printing, shina, plywood, hokusai, shina plywood, cherrywood, printers block, limited edition, demo, hangito, print maker, lean how to, woodblock tutorial, Japanese woodblock tutorial, how to make a woodblock print, how to print with woodblocks, Laura boswell, markmaking, mark making, meet the artist, arnolds attic

Id: ybBdwVNWSzE

Length: 9min 34sec (574 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2019