Time for Week 4+ of my #CarveDecember carving/printing adventures with a countdown through Christmas and Day 30 using the provided prompts. Read on to learn more about my design inspiration along with some new printing tricks discovered along the way!
12/22: Big
"Machine: Zoltar says make your wish.Josh: I wish I were big.[Machine produces a card]Card: Your wish is granted."-Big, 1988 Film starring Tom Hanks
Today's Big prompt immediately reminded me of the classic movie Big and the iconic scene where Tom Hanks (as grown up Josh) and Robert Loggia (as MacMillan) play Heart and Soul and Chopsticks on the big piano in FAO Schwartz.
12/23: Calm
“When the mind is silent like a lake the lotus blossoms.”–Amit Ray, Indian author and "spiritual master"
Quieting my mind with a fabulous morning session of yoga and an evening of carving/printing. The lotus flower outline was available online from template.net as a free coloring page so I could jump ahead to carving and embellishing with some of my favorite doodles. This design was especially meditative to print into different patterns!
12/24: Hard
“Christmas is a piece of one’s home that one carries in one’s heart.”-Freya Stark, British-Italian explorer
Christmas Eve combined with today's Hard prompt inspired me to carve bricks. In addition to the bricks, I carved a star bolt and a wooden plank, plus a few recent carves were included in this festive mix! While carving and printing, I reflected on holiday memories of home including:
⭐️Growing up in NY, my childhood home had two wood burning stoves that were surrounded by brick. Just above, we hung our stockings for Santa to fill Christmas Eve.
⭐️Brick chimneys waiting for Santa to climb down this evening!
⭐️My last apartment in upstate New York was a row house that was built with brick supported by star bolts (which you can see in the photo I printed from Google Maps.)
⭐️Our current home here in CA has a brick facade as well as a beautiful brick fireplace where the pups are patiently waiting for Santa to fill their stockings as they claim to have been extra good this past year!
⭐️And for some reason the 3 Little Pigs' homes made of straw, sticks, and brick! This was of course was before the big bad wolf arrived...although it looked the the wolf may have visited my studio which was a total wreck after all these festive prints!
No matter where you are celebrating, I hope you are inspired to reflect on your favorite home for the holiday memories.
"Oh, there's no place like home for the holidays'Cause no matter how far away you roamIf you want to be happy in a million waysFor the holidays, you can't beat home sweet home"- (There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays, Written by Al Stillman / Robert Allen
12/25: Jolly
"Have a holly jolly ChristmasIt's the best time of the yearNow I don't know if there'll be snowBut have a cup of cheer"-"A Holly Jolly Christmas” written by Johnny Marks
The mug carve and printing was up first. I wanted to stack the mugs and used a mask again so I didn't have to overlap shapes in the final prints. It will take a bit more practice to get the spacing for the stacked look, but you get the idea!
Here are the mug shots!
Up next was glasses of wine with a smaller stamp to fill with your chosen beverage.
This next print was inspired by the pyramid of cups which are filled from the top row and the liquid flows down to the lower levels.
Thankfully Tsukineko makes a VersaFine Clair inkpad in Chianti!
Regardless of your preferred holiday beverage, I hope you enjoyed a cup or two of cheer today!
12/26: Bold
"Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold."-Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher
Bold is part of my personal mantra and business logo. It was fun to layer bold colors and shapes to create these prints! This was carved as one unit before cutting out the smaller square.
That provided me with bonus options for adding colorful accents.
This prompted me to also play with layering primary colors to create secondary colors and tones using grey.
12/27: Artificial
"I prefer living in color."-David Hockney, English painter and photographer
I was initially stumped on today's artificial prompt, until I remembered the little gnome-like bottles of artificial food coloring! This fun shape led to lots of happy prints (and memories of decorating baked goods!)
12/28: Light
"To love beauty is to see light."-Victor Hugo, French Romantic writer and politician
Looking upwards for inspiration. While I've never been a fan of these light covers, they do make for an interesting repeat block print.
12/29: Naive
"The greatest gift I've been given is being naive, because I don't know what I can't do. And when you don't know what you can't do, you think you can do everything."-Kelsea Ballerini, American country pop singer
In honor of today's naive prompt, I turned to my very first hand-carved block print for design inspiration. After a bit of doodling, I dived into the carving. While my skills have certainly improved over the past year, I confess that the 2x2 square blue print challenged my skills and required considerable finetuning (top vs. bottom prints).
But once the cleanup carving was complete, it was time to play with printing potential. As I was sketching/carving these blocks, I had envisioned a primary color grouping with yellow and started with red and blue. First was an American flag.
12/30: Messy
"Art is messy, art is chaos - so you need a system."- Andrew Stanton, American filmmaker and voice actor with Pixar
Carving/printing splats of paint/dye/ink for today's messy prompt.
Enjoy a few sneak peeks into my printing process including the big mess I made tonight, including 3 super long and impressive continuously carved shavings!
One more prompt for the big #CarveDecember finale!
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