Sketchbook Project's print exchange 2015.

Every year I try to participate in the Sketchbook Projects Print exchange- sometimes I get real gems back, and it's a nice little reminder that I went to college to get a minor in Printmaking because Oh Yeah I love this stuff.

This years theme is "Greetings From a Distant Land"

The hope is that you'll end up with prints from Europe and Africa and far away places, the reality is a lot of mine have come from the East coast US- although I did get some cool ones the first year from places like San Francisco and Seattle. I have one from Kansas too.

Last year the theme was Just a Second and I think I had missed posting it up here, but I did a child to adult type theme- as in "it just takes a second to grow up" Maybe the same girl, maybe sisters, something like that.

I started with a drawing and then made it into a photoshop file so I could move stuff around. Of course this was too complex, and had to be simplified for the actual print since they are only allowed to be 5x7. My ambitions got to big for my time constraints.

Then I just carved it up and ran 13 of them off  to go out to the world. Ran off isnt the right term because I ended up printing them by hand, so really I painstakingly rubbed each one with a spoon until I thought my arm would fall off. Now I have a baron so hopefully this year it'll go smoother. 

 The finished product I did a little tweaking to to get it to fit right on the block, simplified some stuff and printed it on a cream colored paper with a dark grey ink that had a little shimmer to it. Because sparkles. Some parts came out a little janky because of clumsy tool handling.


This year I'm not sure if I should do like some fun fantasy world or if I should just do a little relief portrait of my home town somewhere, thinking that to whoever gets it it will be from a far away land.