Process:
Planning- To start off, I looked at the German expressionism art movement for inspiration. A lot of German Expressionism pieces are block print. The have bold lines and bold undefined details. So, I had to pick something that was kind of vague and was bold. I picked the theme of balance and tranquility. Balance makes me immediately think of yin yang, the Chinese symbol that means, two halves together that complete wholeness. I think everyone is balance between a lot of things that make themselves. So I was going to represent that. I actually drew something like this in a math notebook. It was of a persons face made up from the yin yang. There facial features were inside of the symbol. http://helpinghandsprogram.com.au/yin-yang-leadership/
The stars were surprisingly the easiest part. The easiest to carve and the easiest to ink. The hardest were the yin yang and the lotus. It was hard to make perfect curves into the block. I would have thought the smallest carving pieces would be the most difficult. But it was more difficult to remove more of the carving. It was very difficult to try to make perfect circles for the yin and yang. It was a slow process of just trying not to mess it up.
I did a couple of prints of this block. It looked okay but I wasn't 100% happy with it. So I ended up trying again with the same concept.
|
Block Print.
|
But I definitely liked my first one better. This second one is very boring and did not express much to me. I did like the moon phases on the bottom. That was a success. But I think the lotus flower was to vague, even for this project. The first one is more representative of the themes of tranquility and balance. I tried to add more detail onto my first one but the ink did not want to cooperate with the more detail. So I just stuck with my first print.