From Small Sketch to Giant Woodcut

This is the story of my journey to creating my first woodcut relief print ever. My name is Rodrigo. I was in undergrad, in my first printmaking class and I wasn't really sure what I was doing with my life yet. I had taken art classes in high school so I was vaguely familiar with linocut relief prints and etchings. I was going to art school to become a graphic designer. I had taken the introductory class the semester before taking printmaking, but printmaking really spoke to me. Three classes into printmaking and I changed my major completely. I dropped graphic design, it bored me to death and I felt at home in the printmaking studio. I was really looking forward to creating my first lithograph - a process utilizing the greasy attributes of grease crayons and greasy lithographic ink. Basically if you keep the surface of the aluminum plate wet and you roll ink onto your drawing, you can transfer that graphite-like image to paper. Look up Tamarind Institute videos on youtube - they do a great job of teaching in depth.

I had just finished another project and was behind on turning in an image for the lithograph. I was up all night and threw together an image of a tree that resembled the human form - a person mid stride. The tree's branches and knots made up the human body's limbs as well as other images such as elephants and weird faces. It kind of just happened out of nowhere, I'm still not really sure what it alludes to - but I guess I would say that the image suggests that we are composed of our environment and that everything is connected somehow.

Anyways, after creating the lithographs with my professor, Michael Ehlbeck, I asked him about another printmaking class I had noticed walking around with 2x4ft pieces of wood.

"When are we going to do that project Ehlbeck?"
"We're not - we don't have time."
"oh...."
"But I was just invited to create a large scale woodcut at the beach this summer with a group of artists. How would you like to join me? We could do a collaborative print."

Man I was almost speechless. I literally just met this guy a few months ago - his art was amazing and he just asked me if I wanted to collaborate with him. But I jumped on it and agreed almost instantly. I wasn't sure what the hell I was getting myself into, but I was going to attack it head on. He said the image would be roughly 4ftx8ft and we were going to use a steamroller to print it. Traditionally a press is used to print relief prints, or just printing by hand by rubbing the back of the paper.

The semester ended and I told him I would be back in a couple weeks to get started. I would stay up all night drawing on the wood, go home and sleep and when I came back the next day there would be another 5 or 6 hours of drawing done on the wood. It was wild and after five days I started going in earlier and we were both drawing on the wood at the same time.

Then we started carving. The total process took about ten days. Which is kind of mind blowing because other people spent months and months on their pieces.

The day came to go print it, four hours away and we still weren't done.

We got to the event and people were already printing their pieces. Fuck. We carved for another six hours before we finally called it. I had been awake for three days with roughly three hours of sleep on the way there. My hands were cramping up. They were almost stuck in the position they were in to hold the carving gouges. But when it was all said and done I was proud as hell. I didn't know I could do some shit like that. I had just started printmaking man...how? Ehlbeck was a huge inspiration and I could not have done it without him.

A few months later I put together an event on campus and some guy from New York was in town for that one day. He happened to walk by our event and noticed this woodblock propped up behind us. He asked me about buying it and I had no idea where to begin. "You should talk to my professor."

They talked and it turned out he was buying it as a gift for his wife for Christmas. She worked on Wall Street somewhere. So one of these is hanging up in a Wall Street office (maybe still.)

Three years later I would do this again, but going from drawing to finished print in THREE days. Why? I was going on a trip to Dubai and I needed to raise money for my plane ticket since it was the only thing the university wasn't paying for. This time I got a bunch of random people to help. I think overall about 14 different people helped to carve. I had them cut the biggest white areas of the image while I focused on the tighest, most detailed parts. We ended up barely finishing in time also, I know a bunch of people were mad because we finally showed up at the end of the event. People stayed a couple hours later than they intended...oops! In my defense I had stayed up for two days straight again.

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Anyways, I hope you enjoyed my story, if not, at least my images. I spent a ton of time on them and I thought you guys might like them. Thanks for reading!