I finally made prints from the block I carved, but I haven’t yet shown them as a finished edition for sale. So this is a bit of a quick preview!
Block printing for the first time in the studio
A friend of mine was getting rid of a desk, so I pinched it to give me a separate surface that would be perfect for cracking on with the printing. It was great, but I still covered all of the available surface and ran out of room. I just can’t work any smaller…
Hand rubbing with a baren
At first I really struggled to get a satisfactory print with my plastic baren, so I substituted the back of a stainless steel measuring cup. It worked fine, but what I didn’t expect was getting hot fingers from holding the inside of the cup as I rubbed it over the block!
![Using a measuring cup as a baren.](http://leedevonish.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/baren-substitute-e1534604657993.jpg)
As there was no room for stacking wet prints, I used some old skirt hangers that I’d been saving just for this purpose, along with some doubled-up space-saving hanger thingies.
![Alternative drying rack](https://leedevonish.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/block-prints-drying1.jpg)
Casting aluminium ingots
We got the furnace fired up again to melt more cans and make more ingots in readiness for casting our finished projects.
In all honesty, it was a bit of a pain not jumping straight into casting the end products, but I didn’t even have a finished prototype of my coin sculpture, so there was no point in rushing it.
![Our first aluminium ingot](http://leedevonish.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/aluminium-ingot.jpg)
I sacrificed a donut-shaped muffin tin for the cause. It was worth it as I never seemed to get anything out of there in one piece anyway, and the ingots come out as cute mini metal rings!
Coming soon…
I’ve got a coin prototype that I’m almost happy with and some new coin prints to add to the store. In between these projects I did a bit of graphite and charcoal drawing on canvas and played around with combining it with acrylic colour… so yeah, lots to share next time!
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