The Ruling Machine: Wood Engraving’s Secret Weapon (live online) Monday October 25, 1pm EDT

Wood Engraving course Saturday, (live online) October 30, 10:00 am – Noon PDT (1-3pm EDT)

Join Joanne Price for this interactive wood engraving introduction — from sketches to finished proof, all in two hours! Part discussion, part demonstration, this edition of Long-Distance Letterpress will examine how miniature imagery can make a big impact. Participants are encouraged to ask any questions and receive a print of the demonstration block by mail. It’s going to be BIG!
Register today!

I was thrilled to be a participant in Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest’s Bug-a-Palooza events in September:
The Beauty of Bugs panel discussion lead by Bernheim’s Jenny Zeller with guest artists Joanne Price, Shannon Amidon, Angel Yoon Kyung Cho, and Bob Drake. My section starts right about the 33:40 mark.

On September 18th I led an in-person Insect Mural Collaborative Project – free for anyone attending Bug-a-Palooza at Bernheim. It was loads of fun!

Watch for When Children Ruled the World, by Sena Jeter Naslund (Ahab’s Wife), published by Larkspur Press. I worked long and hard to get 9 wood engraved illustrations (8 shown above) finished this summer (and into autumn). The book is printed using hand-set type and illustrations printed directly from the original woodblocks. It’s a gem of a child’s Christmas story at remarkably reasonable prices for such artisan work.

Thanks for reading!
Joanne Price

The post Autumn 2021 Activities appeared first on Starpointe Studio.

“For me, wood engraving’s intimate scale and slow pace provide a welcome respite from our cyber-fast world. The tactile nature and physicality of the relief printmaking process is satisfying. The strokes of my tools reveal the light, with the image slowly emerging from a darkened surface. It is charmingly mysterious and feeds my need for quiet concentration and hands-on creative productivity.” – Joanne Price

Wood Engraving (also known as Xylography) was developed in the late 18th century by Thomas Bewick (1753–1828), an artist and naturalist in Northern England. Bewick made his living doing commercial graphic design work, much like modern day designers do – making ads, business cards and logos combining image and text. Bewick engraved both cooper and wood, but excelled in the latter. From the 1830s – early 1900s, wood engravings dominated illustration in newspapers, magazines, and in books with demand for increased edition sizes. The demands of the Industrial Revolution created a medium that could be as detailed as copper engraving, able to withstand thousands of impressions and could be printed at the same time as the text. This reduced the printing time, labor, and cost of illustrating text.

Once photographic techniques gained a broader foothold in workshops, the creative engraver in commercial realms declined, but the relief medium as an art form truly blossomed in the early 1900s.

Come discover this medium, steeped in its history, utilized in a computer age, with me!

I’ll show you how I cut my original drawings into endgrain wood. I will demonstrate how I ink and print my wood blocks. I’ll also talk about the history, the tools and materials, as well as contemporary resources and examples. 

Price is nationally known for her wood engravings and is president of the Wood Engravers Network, an organization that fosters education and creates a resource for wood engravers. She has led wood engraving workshops throughout the country, has exhibited widely and teaches printmaking at the University of Kentucky.

The post Wood Engraving Demo at Kentucky Artisan Center at Berea August 11 appeared first on Starpointe Studio.