Making a Page for Testament

When I set out to make Testament, all 288 hand painted, block printed, and hand written pages, I didn’t have much of a plan. I knew I wanted to write a book. I knew I wanted to make it an artifact. I knew I was going to hand make every single page. And I knew I wanted to get back into block printing.

This was not a linear process, despite what I am going to share today. There was a lot of trial and error. Ideas flowed and changed entire approaches. My favorite thing happened a lot where I ruin something and have to figure out a way to fix it without redoing everything.

This brings us to Swit the Blue, a character from Testament that got a full linoblock print. I luckily documented a lot of the process with this piece and will use her as an example of the page construction. It all starts with an idea…

Swit the Blue swam the rivers, lakes, and seas.
Smiling and joyful. Deep she dove unbound.
Endless she danced, mirthful, and playful.
Living moment-to-moment. In the now.
Laughter did she give to those in most need.
Capricious. Wrathful. She was as water.
She crashed. She flowed. No gloom could forebear her.
She was the dancing laughter of our hearts.

Sketch to Drawing

I rarely capture my sketching process, but I can certainly talk to it. I typically work with very, very loose and incomprehensible thumbnails to get my ideas about a composition down. I will then pull together a larger sketch and get it into the computer so I can size it appropriately and print out a version. With a light box, I draw over the sketch to get to the final piece.

When making pieces to be carved, though, you have to do the work in reverse. To keep my brain from breaking, I used vellum for the light box so I could reverse it for the carbon transfer to the linoblock as seen below.

Carbon Transfer

The next step in the process is to transfer the piece to the block. Some artists like to prep their blocks with a light dye or paint to make it easier to see what they are removing. I never really had an issue and never found much value in doing that for myself. So for me, I take the vellum, some carbon paper, and use a sharp pointed pen to do the transfer. My favorite are the Muji gel ink pens from Japan. 

As you can see below, I sometimes do a little color work on the transfer paper to help me fix in my brain where the composition will go once I start carving. It is more a helpful guide than a necessary step, as I rarely get enough time to finish a piece all in one sitting.

Test Printing

One thing I have come to learn is I absolutely need to test print. Often times, when carving a block, I misjudge the depth of the cut out or the size of the lines I am looking for. It is supper important to test print to see how the ink I am going to use is going to work with the composition. It also gives me a sense of how the paper will take the ink, as I am often playing with different paper.

In fact, at one point, I planned on hand making all the paper for this work. I made about 20 sheets of cotton paper, but despite loving how they worked for the prints, they kinda sucked for the folding bit when making a book. A shame, but it forced me to try out a bunch of different papers.

Painting Every Page

I knew from the start that I wanted to paint every single page of the book and hand write the text. I used a combination of watercolors, gouache, markers, inks, and metallic paints to get the effects I wanted on each page. I also attacked each page out of order to let the work surprise me as I brought it all together.

As you can see from the image, the snippet of the poem at the start of this post is on a separate page in the final work. That is because each spread is set up as a signature in the book for when I hand sewed it together. It required probably the most planning to organize the text correctly with the prints, but after doing so, the painting process was more random. I simply grabbed any page from the stack and started work.

I could go on and on about the process of making this book, but that is best for video and audio, which I plan on doing soon. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this little bit of insight into how I made Testament.