The last few weeks have been busy at Flying Seal Press. I’m now proud co-renter of a space at the Andersonville Galleria in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago.

The space is being shared with a friend who makes lovely handmade books.

I’ve also been printing a new Holiday design inspired by the flag of Chicago. Because it’s an awesome flag. And how cool is it that we have a flag, anyway?

These were printed with a Print Gocco, which is a currently not-in-production semi-obscure form of Japanese home printing technology which, like the flag, is basically pretty awesome.

Chicago Flag cards on etsy

Have finally resolved the problem I was having with the blacks in the Jackalope. Yay successful troubleshooting!

Wednesday a friend and I went to a Drink ‘n’ Draw, where we had ciders and contemplated a taxidermied coyote.

One of the best resources for relief printmakers is the Baren Forum, a community of printmakers working in the western and moku hanga tradition worldwide.  They sponsor a number of print exchanges each year, as well as an annual New Years card exchange.  I’ve been a mostly lurking member for several years now, but this year and last year I signed up for the New Years cards.  It’s been absolutely wonderful getting a few dozen handprinted cards from around the world.

Here are a few of the cards I’ve gotten so far:

Of course, I’m also supposed to be sending my own cards out to all of these lovely people…

In my defense, it is year of the rabbit, and there are still entire months left to the year.  More importantly, I’m still getting rabbit cards at a rate of about one a week from everyone else, so I don’t feel like I’m terribly far behind.  Still, after a few months of fussing over ideas and sketches of my design, I finally decided I might as well just get the linoleum out and see what happened when I carved it.

When I began brainstorming my card design, I knew I wanted it one colour (red for auspiciousness) and there needed to be a rabbit in the moon. I liked the idea of mirroring the rabbit with another rabbit on earth…

Originally both rabbits were going to be jumping, and at least one was going to be a jackalope, and both were probably going to be done in a heavily stylized fashion… but I wasn’t sure what was going to be red, and what white, or maybe red and gold…

(I’m sparing you all a lot of bad sketches of rabbits I did while I was trying to work out the poses and anatomy and design.)

Of course, no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and somewhere along the line one rabbit became very stylized, the other one became much more realistic, and a ground plane got in there. But by the end, it was a lot stronger than the original concept sketches had been, and I’m pretty happy with it.

After a great deal of drawing, looking at pictures of bunnies online, erasing, and then redrawing, I had one composition and two rabbits I was happy with. Then I began very carefully carving, because I wanted to maintain the quality of the Sharpie drawing. Linoleum doesn’t have a grain to carve against, which makes it easier to carve than wood, but it’s also more fragile. Try to carve too fine a line and it will collapse under the pressure of the press.

Finally the linocut was carved and ready to be inked up, which meant it was also time to register it and mix the red ink. A few proofs in I decided that it worked better compositionally if the image was moved about 1/4 inch up on the paper. Luckily, I could just carve away more of the linoleum to shift it.

And here we have the first fifty or so bunnies! Once they’re dry, they’ll be signed, numbered, and sent out into the great wide world to meet other printmakers.

Closeup of an individual card:

It’s been quiet on the blog lately, which is of course inversely proportional to how my life has been.

I’ve lost one job, begun another (not quite in that order) , taught a book arts class, presented a paper on graphic narrative at the Cultural Studies Association annual conference and just got back from a long weekend in New Orleans, which is an amazing city.  With incredible cemeteries.

And of course, I now have this lovely, if heavily-in-progress website, which will eventually contain portfolios of the letterpress, custom work, wedding invitations, and guest books.

I had a half a dozen pictures I planned to post with this, but neither flickr nor photobucket is cooperating, so I’ll update again later with images.

Welcome to the new site!

February 3 begins the Chinese year of the Rabbit. It also marked a great deal of snow here in Chicago.