Adjusting Wood Block Design for Relief Printing

Video Transcript

"Now you can see that we have our proof, and I think there's a couple areas that could use a little more work. I'd like the side of this bridge, this abstract form here, to stand out a little bit more, so I can go back in and cut. What's nice now, at this point, too, is you can actually see on the block the dark versus the light. So, there's two things you can do here. Go ahead and begin to cut the block with the ink on it, and you can see your marks, as well. Maybe taking a piece of paper to hold the block in place, or using another block, you can hold it so you don't get ink on your hands. You can see that, I'll probably reveal this. This is why it's a proof. I'll go back in here. I'd really like this street light to reveal itself, and I think I'm actually going to cut some marks across, as well, to kind of show the light from the street pole, the street lamp, itself. And maybe rough up the background a little bit more to create a gray so that this dominant shape here stands out as well. So, alls I need to do is reinvestigate the block with my tools. So, you can see, I'm reinforcing some contrast in my image, making sure that this nice, bigger shape shows up. And I'm also going back through and defining my horizon line here. So, now that I've made my corrections, I'm going to proof this wood block again, which, I believe, will be my finished, complete image. Voila! As you can see, here are the two proofs that I've pulled off my wood block. This is the first state, and here we have the second state of this wood block. In the first state, all of the bottom information primarily remained the same. It's up here in the sky, so to speak, is where I've changed the image. I really enjoyed this light pole coming up in the initial photograph, so I wanted to reinforce the fact that that was a light pole. So, you can see here that it barely was legible. And what I did over here was take my C, or my V-gouge, I'm sorry, and cut marks that were like rays of light coming from the street lamp. And I added a couple more marks in the sky, as well as took that wire brush over the sky again, and made that gray value in the background. We can also see these little knots in the wood a little bit better than we can over here because I've roughed up the wood grain. One thing to notice, as well, is, in both of these, we can really see the tool that created the mark. Here we have that screwdriver that I pounded into the block, and here we have these fine lines made from a V-gouge. And then we have these larger cuts that were made from the C-gouge, and the wire brush effect, as well. You can really tell the mark in the tool on the surface of the wood, or the linoleum, when you make the cut."