Another chaotic week at the studio.
Today was Brazilian Valentine’s Day, and all I wanted to do was quickly go in, run the next layer of color, and get back home to enjoy the afternoon with my boyfriend. But things are never this easy with printmaking, right?
I started by getting my dry prints of the rack and getting the second mask attached to the top of my board. The dry prints looked gorgeous, and although it was a bit tricky, I figured out a way to secure both sides of the mask together with tape so they wouldn’t move so much when placing it down – since both sides of the mask were only attached to the top, it was pretty flimsy. I taped up the bottom section where the mask hangs outside the design to help keep everything in place.
I did not need to ink the whole board for this layer, since I was printing only the center section of the board. I used a narrow roll to only ink the desired stripe.
After a few pulls, I was confused. I kept getting a weird result that I could not make sense of. Even though my guide was improved from the second layer to this third one (with the raised corners to help secure the paper in place, read more about it in the last post), I was getting the last two layers aligned (2&3) but not the first. This was odd because the latter one should be aligned with the first one, if I am now using the guide properly, or with none of them, since I have not been using it correctly/I have been working on improving it along the way. So the big lesson is that the guide is still incorrect and needs to be redone and that I need to be very careful in the printing process of multiple layers and right down all the details of the pulling process like the placement of the which corner in which order, the direction the board is being press through and such.
Printing the first four pieces and realizing my guide was completely off was frustrating in itself, but what made it even more difficult was how hard it was to communicate with others about it. I was struggling to talk things through with my peers and with Bebeto, the studio manager and printmaking master. I found it hard to stay focused on my work, to fully process the alignment issues, and to express what I was thinking or needing. It became a kind of emotional labor, and I felt once again the challenges of working in a shared studio space.
Talking about the art-making process is hard. Trying to explain what was going wrong or to share my hypotheses with Bebeto was mentally exhausting. Writing it all down here hasn’t been easy either. It’s always a challenge to decide what details to include, what to leave out, and how to describe things clearly without it turning into a confusing mess. Honestly, the first draft of this post read like a 14-year-old’s diary entry—but hey, it’s all part of the process. In the end, this is good practice and a fun way to stretch the big thinking box.
Besides all that was going through my mind, during the fourth pull, another problem emerged; one of the squares on the board came off, messing up the design. To make it worse, I was so scatter-minded that I misplaced and lost the piece. All that was left to do was to stop the printing process for the day and patch up the board with some wood putty.
I decided to keep the two leftover pieces unprinted as color guides for the future.
I was feeling a little down, so I sat down with a cup of coffee to take a break. Absentmindedly, I started carving a different project I’ve had waiting to be finished. As I worked, I overheard a lively conversation between a few older women in the studio. They’re from a generation quite different from mine, and I loved listening to their stories and experiences. One of them used to be an illustrator for a magazine that the other adored—and got in trouble at her Christian school for reading it. Moments like these are what I treasure about the shared studio experience: hearing about different artists’ perspectives, their adventures, who they’ve met, where they’ve been, and what they’ve studied.
However amused, I was still hungry, cold, and tired. So then, I called it a day and enjoyed the rest of the evening with my partner.
Check out last week’s studio log:
Context note: “Xilo is a nickname in Portuguese for woodblock printing. It’s a prefix related to wood, and it has Greek roots.“
‘Till next week, crafters!
