Title: Heartbreak
Medium: Block Print Size: 23x15 cm October 2015 Exhibition Text For this project, my main focus was creating a piece that is based off of the theme "obsession". It was inspired off of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, a German expressionist painter. My original intention for this block print was to have it symbolize some sort of obsession towards someone else. All is self-made within the medium. |
Process
Planning
To begin this piece, I did a little bit of research first, and afterwards, I sketched all the ideas that were coming to me from that research. The images below were my brainstorming sketches.
Planning
To begin this piece, I did a little bit of research first, and afterwards, I sketched all the ideas that were coming to me from that research. The images below were my brainstorming sketches.
When I was doing research, I was looking for health and/or psychology articles that would provide me with some info about things that can potentially become an obsession. Throughout the research, I found out that these sorts of things can be range from body/dieting obsession, to gambling, to work obsession. The one that interested me the most was how "love" can eventually become an obsession, because as soon as I read about this, multiple ideas were flowing around in my head, and so I stuck with this idea.
Process
Linoleum Carving
The main difficulty I had with this part of the process was carving the path and the heart. The path was going to be white, and so were the veins inside the heart. In order for an area to be white, I had to carve it. The path makes up a big part of the print, so I'd have to carve a lot near the bottom, and carve the veins carefully too, otherwise it was going to lose the actual figure of a heart.
Another thing that happened during this process was that I once carved through the linoleum. I was worried that the path wasn't going to show up in the prints, but I ended up carving way too much,
Block Printing
This part of the process was where I actually inked the linoleum and passed the print on to paper. I didn't expect it to be that complicated, and I thought that my first attempt was going to be nice and clean, but my predictions were wrong. Making the prints wasn't the difficult part, rather, it was to figure out how much ink was needed to make the print darker, smooth, and crisp. I experimented with different amounts of ink, and quickly learned that in order for the print to come out like I wanted it to, I needed a fair amount of ink. It took me six prints to finally get the right one. (pictures of this process and the tools used below)
Linoleum Carving
The main difficulty I had with this part of the process was carving the path and the heart. The path was going to be white, and so were the veins inside the heart. In order for an area to be white, I had to carve it. The path makes up a big part of the print, so I'd have to carve a lot near the bottom, and carve the veins carefully too, otherwise it was going to lose the actual figure of a heart.
Another thing that happened during this process was that I once carved through the linoleum. I was worried that the path wasn't going to show up in the prints, but I ended up carving way too much,
Block Printing
This part of the process was where I actually inked the linoleum and passed the print on to paper. I didn't expect it to be that complicated, and I thought that my first attempt was going to be nice and clean, but my predictions were wrong. Making the prints wasn't the difficult part, rather, it was to figure out how much ink was needed to make the print darker, smooth, and crisp. I experimented with different amounts of ink, and quickly learned that in order for the print to come out like I wanted it to, I needed a fair amount of ink. It took me six prints to finally get the right one. (pictures of this process and the tools used below)
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