"Kleinstück" is a four colored reduction woodcut print. Edition of ten prints on 120 g/qm Fabriano "Accademia" paper, papersize is 30 x 70 cm.
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Have you ever wondered about the origin of your surname? We`ll i`ve wondered a few times about my own name "Kleinstück", which roughly translates to "Littlepiece", but i couldn`t find anything. So i had to come up with my own explaination, which of course can only be, that my ancestors have been veeeery small in height. I`m glad we`ve grown a little over time so that i`ve been able to cut this story into wood.
Enjoy the process :).
What you can see here is a very rough sketch, but it`s also pretty much what you can find in the final print.
The final drawing of the motive always starts as pencil drawing and is finalized with water resistant felt pens. Correction pens are also in use from time to time, but they will vanish when you clean the block with solvent. The color of the felt pens is not always the color that will be printed. Now it`s time for chipping away everything that is supposed to be the color of the paper, which is white in my motive.
This time i`ve tried a new method of registering the prints with these hole-markers and the counterpart that holds the paper in place. Every sheet of printing paper has to be prepared beforehand with two of these markers which you can remove once you`ve printed all the layers.
After mixing the colors and rolling out the gradient, the whole thing will be transferred to the block. Since i do not own one of the big rollers i`ve had to use two 15cm wide rollers, which is a bit tricky, but works fine as you can see. Also i`ve had to think about mixing enough of the violet color cause the second layer is also supposed to be printed in that tone.
There we have it, a pretty nice gradient.
Time to carve away all the places that should stay in the tone of the gradient, so that i can print the second layer without overprinting it.
Registering the paper with the help of my markers and the counterparts.
The blue or violet spots in the red part of the gradient you can see here don`t matter, cause they will be overprinted with the next color layers.
Again chipping away the parts that i have printed the last layer with.
The registration works on point, the third color is down on the paper.
I`ve mixed different yellow tones as you can see in the picture above, but I`ve chosen this darker yellow, which turned out to be a bit too dark for my taste in the very end. But that`s how you learn the way of the reduction woodcut print ;).
The last color is going down, which is always the darkest tone of the motive (at least in my way of working). The whole block is reduced to it`s final stadium, everything else that has already been printed in the previous steps is carved away.
Also with the last color down, the registration is still on point. The yellow streaks you can see here partly are not caused by a faulty registration but by applying too much or too fluid ink, which can result in these squeezed edges.
