Cartouche network

I did this as a substrate for mixed-media pieces - specifically, I wanted one to put on the cover of my laptop. It's done from katsura onto some rather nice Indian paper (this piece has cornflower petals - I also did plain white, grey, and medium grey-blue, and haven't decided which I'll use yet) without dampening it.

Originally, I was intending the network to be much more vine-like, but I'm not unhappy with the way it turned out.

Second woodcut

For this one, I decided to try cutting out areas to leave a raised line, instead of gouging out the lines of the design as before. It's harder work, but a lot of fun, and I can see it gives more opportunity to use the wood's nature.

Printmaking - woodblock experiment 1

Lessons learned from this one - firstly, that printing from wood really isn't the same as printing from lino. Having a solid block rather than a flexible piece of lino to work on is good, but it also leaves me open to edge effects. I also need to use quite a bit more ink than I think I do.

Second, if I'm going to leave a gutter and a non-printing area at the edge, I need to make the gutter quite a bit larger. The square frame above was intended that way, but didn't work out.