![]() Pauses for periodical touch-up sharpening are easy to work into the woodcutting routine and will give you a small rest as you carve as well as the best edge for the job. A very good reason to learn to do this yourself is that toh tips break frequently and it's just not practical to break your pace of carving to send out for repairs. After the repair/reshaping, hit them with the water stones to remove the deep scratches from the diamond surfaces and to polish to a smooth surface. Reserve the coarse stone for major repairs. A set of diamond 1 x 3 inch 'stones' in coarse, fine and extra fine are ideal for reshaping these knives' geometry in a mater of a five minutes or so. It is really very easy and will allow you to work uninterrupted when the Muse is upon you. I hope your blade will be all you want it to be when it is returned to you but I want to encourage you to do this work yourself in the future. I'm hoping to pick it up tomorrow, as good as new. For a mere $5.00 they were happy to reshape my knife for me. I found a local precision tool sharpening company with the welcome words "No Job Too Small" on its advertisement. I briefly thought about getting a motorized sharpener, but found it to be cost prohibitive. I have managed to learn to use a leather honing block and some small water stones to keep the edges sharp on my little tool set, but the broken point was too much for me and my attempts to reshape the knife just made matters worse. I've tried to learn the subtleties of sharpening, but it all makes my eyes glaze over a little bit - maybe it's a girl thing. Interestingly, even though I'm using these woodworking tools on a daily basis, I'm not really a tool kind of person. Although I rarely use such linework in my own prints, I do use the hangi-to quite often, so I was pretty upset when I dropped mine on a hard floor and the point broke! The hangi-to is essential for carving the beautiful thin black lines that are always found in ukiyo-e prints. Then larger areas are cleared away from these outlines using gouges and chisels. The hangi-to, pronounced hahn _ gee (hard g) _ toe, is used to closely outline the design on a block. Moku Hanga printing is simply not possible using western cotton rag papers.This is a Japanese hangi-to, the carving knife that's used most often in traditional moku hanga. The paper is prepared the night before printing by wetting it and it is kept moist throughout the printing process. Registration is making sure that subsequent blocks are lined up correctly. The actual printing is done by hand using a baren. The Kozo can be unbleached as a buff coloured paper, or bleached, called Hosho.Īll important is the registration when doing multicolour prints. The Kozo is made with long fibres of the bark of the mulberry tree whereas the Gampi can be made from other shrubs. The paper used can only be Kozo or Gampi. For the black colour, Sumi is used, an intense, black, sour-smelling paste made of burned fish. ![]() When printing Moku Hanga style the only ingredients used are water, a paste made of rice flour (nori) and dry pigment which is made into a paste by adding a bit of ethanol. In the photos you can see examples of blocks for the simple mono colour prints as well as a sequence of blocks and the gradual build up of an image as each subsequent block is printed. ![]() In short you can go anywhere where your imagination takes you. Woodworm-riddled pieces of wood also made for some interesting effects. Australian Hoop pine plywood made good blocks and sometimes, if accuracy wasn’t so important, cheap poplar timber ply did the job nicely. When cutting blocks for the Japanese traditional style printing, Moku Hanga, I used nice blocks of cherry, but not the prized mountain cherry as I simply couldn’t lay my hands on that. It has a beautiful, fine, even texture and yet is hard enough to withstand some vigorous printing. I have used a few priceless pieces of heart Kauri, Agathis australis, recovered from New Zealand swamps and carbon dated at 50,000 years old. One print was made with a block of beech plank as it was done during the middle ages. Western style mono block is normally black and white but you can introduce more blocks and colours, so in fact it can be any combination you can think of. Just as there are many roads leading to Rome, there are many ways to do wood block printing as well and I like to explore the possibilities. Projects completed since coming to France.Woodwork, Carpentry, ébénisterie, Hout bewerking.Houtzaag en Koren Molen Agneta in Ruurlo.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |