Fiery Salamanders

        This weekend I was at Roslindale Open Studios, and I had brought several small simple blocks to work on.  This turned out not to be enough - for my next show, in December, I’m determined to bring something ridiculously huge and detailed to be sure to keep me busy!  (It was a great weekend, though, so I’m willing to overlook the inconvenience of not having enough carving.  The absolute star of the show was the steampunk bat!)  And now that I’m back home in my studio, I’ve been printing the blocks I carved.

        Here’s the first one I’ll share, the mythical salamander.  For the details on this creature, you can read my earlier post about it.  In the design I had the idea to give it a border, and I tried to make the border set off from the center of the block, but simultaneously growing naturally out of it.   I also worked on making the salamander himself fiery, to make it very clear that this isn’t just an ordinary real-life salamander!

        As you can see, I tried two different experiments with printing my block.  For the top variant I painted the paper with watercolor, then printed with black ink on top of the color.  For the bottom variant I inked the block with black, then rolled the edges of the block with red ink all the way around before printing.  I do like the brighter, more fiery one better, but I think the other is pretty cool, too, in a more smoldering sort of way.

[Pictures: Fiery Salamander, two variations, rubber block print by AEGN, 2015.]