Creatures & Cards

I was sitting at my desk, working on the design for the next Loyal Luddite card, when I sensed a hulking shadow pass the window immediately to my right. I looked outside, hoping it was the landlord doing yard work or something else unthreatening. Turns out, it was a turkey vulture buzzing my window.

For the record, these things are huge. And ugly. There was about a dozen of them fighting each other at the end of my driveway. These are carrion birds. They were competing for a dead rabbit by the side of the road. And because there's a decent amount of traffic, the birds kept circling and playing shadows across my window.

Lest they confuse my sedentary shape on the other side of the glass with a carcass, I moved to the studio on the opposite side of house. Where I gladly opened the window for the first time this year. Instead of warm breezes and the scents of spring, I found an infestation of ants. Opening the window acted as a floodgate releasing the ants from between the glass and the screen to spill over the window sill into the studio. Sorry ants, we simply can not coexist peacefully in my studio. This picture shows about 1/10 of them. After giving the ants a deadly feast, I took a shower to wash off the creepy crawly feeling. 

At which point I finally got to work. Here's a peek at the next Loyal Luddite offering. Instead of drawing the paper doll chains, I actually cut them out of dark paper, scanned them, and then resized them and played with the layout in Photoshop. The picture below shows the design on paper in the middle of the shot, which I "colored in" with a soft lead pencil. Then I taped the paper, design side down, to the block which is pictured on the left. To transfer the design to the block, I rubbed the back side of the paper with the bone folder, the tongue depressor looking thing to the left of the blue pencil. This transfers the pencil lead from the paper to the block.

Then, the carving begins. The red and blue handled devices below are carving tools. Shaped blades fit into the shiny end. Some tools have fixed blades, the ones I use allow the blades to be interchanged. I like to use two handles so I have two different sized blades ready to use at any given time.

And, yes, the text is backwards on the block. Like a rubber stamp, the block prints in reverse. So any design needs to be cut as a mirror image to what the final print will look like.