Valerie Syposz recently created a wood engraving artwork and explains the process of a print as follows:

バレリー・サイポーズは、 最近制作した木版画の制作過程について以下のとおり説明しています。

“What could be more representative of summer than love and ice cream? For me, these things make up the heart of summer, so I decided to combine them in my recent wood engraving ‘The Real Deal’. Wood engraving is a kind of relief printmaking, where you carve into a hard wood, like box wood or cherry. I used a cross section slice of boxwood, which allows for very fine detail. After carving, I printed the block onto Gampi paper, and then used the technique of chine-collé to layer colors and collage the print onto a heavier paper. Voilà! A perfect summer print.”

Image above: The prepared block is ready to be carved. I used sumi to darken the surface and drew the outline of the image onto the block. Beside the wood are a couple of the carving tools I use, and I have it placed on a revolving tray to carve curved lines. For wood engraving, curved lines are carved by rotating the block and not by moving your hand.

Images above: Progression of the carved image. The black lines are the original drawing and the lighter lines are the areas I carved. The block starts out completely black, and you progressively carve out the white areas to create the image.

Image above: Printing process. Lifting off the gampi paper after printing to reveal the image.

Image above: The final result, the printed gampi was layered on top of 2 different colored papers and collaged to a heavy rag paper.

*Please see http://www.mizenka.com/artist/Valerie-Syposz for Valerie Syposz’s artworks.

* バレリー・サイポーズの作品はhttp://www.mizenka.com/jp/artist/Valerie-Syposzでご高覧いただけます。