Month: October 2018

Project 2 – Lino Carving

Title: The woman of art
I’ve always found Geisha to be a mysterious woman who lives her life to entertain men with performances and songs. There is a saying that geisha live in a separate world called the flower and willow world where courtesans were known as the flower and geisha as the willow due to their fineness, strength and grace.

Geisha are donned with a set of beautiful kimono, full face of make up, entertaining various clients, some even of high status quo, with their elegant and graceful performances. However, behind all the beauty, geisha had to attend various classes in the day, work long hours at night and attending an average of 10 parties per night. In the past, some geisha also have sad lives where their parents sell them off to be a geisha. And yet, they leave their exhaustion behind them, as they serve and perform elegantly.

The history of geisha never fail to inspire me to appreciate life. Everyone live their lives differently. I shouldn’t judge a person base on his/her cover as we never know what is going on behind that beautiful mask he/she is wearing.

Difficulties faced throughout Project 2

I guess the hardest part of this assignment was carving. I am a left handed person, but I only use my left hand to write and does everything else with my right hand. This mean that although my left hand can draw and follow pattern of the image I traced on the linoleum accurately, it does not have good control/strength over holding a tool. (I hold my chopsticks with my right hand). So while carving, there were many times that I lost control and end up slicing more linoleum than I should. And the effect of this was irreversible. Having a little bit of OCD, it hurts my eyes to see the mistake on my linoleum pad.

Another problem was with the inking. As most of my classmates prefer to hand-stamp onto the block printing paper, I had to use the machine. This is because no matter how hard I ink my linoleum pad to the paper, it was very uneven. The machine was great, but took a bit of adjusting before it could press down a nice pattern.

The ink also dry up rather quickly, and if I put another layer of paint onto the half-dried ink, it gets tacky and have some bumpy residue. Then I had to wash my linoleum pad and wait for it to fully dry before inking it again. (If it doesn’t fully dry, it will leave like a “glow” around the lines which was not pretty).

My takeaway

I like how I’m beginning to see design principles in the real world. And how things start to make sense to me. I now know the trick to taking nicer photos and also using the power of cropping which can totally transform the dimension of an image.

I learn to have patience in this assignment. We can only see the outcome of our work at the end of the day, when we finish printing it onto the block printing paper. As the process from drawing to carving would take very long, whenever I made mistake, I learnt to embrace the error instead of dreading the final outcome. The imperfections I made represents me. If I kept redo-ing my work until it is perfect with no flaws, it wouldn’t reflect the beauty of a handmade print.

Lino Carving Research

Research
Lino carving was first used between 1905 and 1913, by a group of German artists, known as Die Brücke, for wallpaper printing. Sharpe knifes with various shape tips like U or V shaped are used to cut into linoleum sheets, and then inked using a roller before imprinting onto paper.

Many lino artists have used Instagram as a platform to showcase their work  and some of them have very amazing portfolio.

One of the artist that I really like is Andrea Lauren. Her block prints are very colourful and vibrant, incorporating.

 https://instagram.com/inkprintrepeat 

I also like Scott minzy’s work as his work is made up of clean lines. He plays around with the thickness of lines to create depth and contours of his prints.

https://www.instagram.com/scottminzy/

 

Preparation
I carved out two templates which I can refer to when I am doing project 2. They are mostly based on design elements like lines and shapes.

Template 1
This was the first piece I did which includes experimenting with thick and thin lines, short and long and also curvy lines.
Template 2
For the second piece, I got a bit more adventurous with my lines. Thin and close lines, curvy lines, crosshatch, chevron prints and circles.

My classmates did really interesting presentations which opened my eyes to the world of art and design. If I were to take photos, I would always just “follow feelings”. Now I learnt that every photo must have proper proportional, scale and balance in order to let the image pop, which I will surely incorporate them into project 2.

Image result for gestalt law

I am ready to start working on my pieces!

Planning

For project 2, I thought of the story of a geisha and how it inspires me.

Our project involves the creation of two Lino-cut black and white prints.

Through research on the topic of geisha, I was able to get a better idea of what would work for me. I initially, I wanted to do a story about geisha and teahouse. However, I realize that it would be a very shallow story. Thus, my teacher suggested that I could do something along the line of geisha being my inspiration.

And that is how I researched and read up that geisha live in a world of the flower and willow. So I decide to work along that idea.

I chose to portray my flowers using sakura (cherry blossom) flowers because it is such a beautiful flower and it represents fragility and beauty of life.

For willow, I decided to use branches of willow tree. Willow tree represents strength and the ability to withstand tough challenges. Also, the branches bends in such shape that looks rough and full of tension.

And here is 60 seconds of my process, from sketching on procreate (iPad app, my first time using, was very fun!), to cutting the linoleum pad: