Always inspired by Munari’s Roses in the Salad, I stole some bok choy remnants off the chopping block on the kitchen counter and made some prints to use later in collages. (See also: onions and peppers.)
Onions and peppers
Here are some printing experiments with a leftover red onion and blue ink stamp, a la Bruno Munari’s Roses in the Salad.
https://twitter.com/austinkleon/status/1422287841380478978?s=20
I’m also a big fan of using peppers. (Or whatever leftover vegetables happen to be on the cutting board and the mood strikes.)
I’ve started incorporating some of these prints into my collages:
Carving Coconuts
It has been days since I saw Coconut The Owl, so in an attempt to bring her back into view, I spent yesterday morning making these block prints:
I use really cheap, simple tools. You can get most of what you need in one handy little kit online. (Try poking around the Speedball store.) I like to print on random newspaper pages at first, both to test the print and see what random colors do to it.
I’ve been inspired by Frasconi: Against the Grain, a wonderful out-of-print monograph of the woodcut work of Antonio Frasconi, who emphasized that anyone could make block prints and that you “don’t have to go to a special place, with a lot of heavy equipment. This is something you can do in any corner of your home.”
Block printing is also a wonderful thing to do with kids. My oldest can carve safely, especially with the soft “speedy carve” style blocks. My youngest, who’s a little more cautious, helped me with the brayer.
I might find some good paper and do an actual run on this print. Sign up for my weekly newsletter to be the first to know when they’re available.
Kennedy prints!
A doodle from an inspiring Quarantine Book Club last night with letterpress printer Amos Kennedy, Jr. (@kennedyprints on Instagram.)
He’s currently renovating an old “Pile of Bricks” in Detroit to be a printmaking studio and a place for people to learn how to print.
I’m really into his books right now:
Here’s just a tiny gallery of some of my favorites of his:
Search for him on YouTube and enjoy — there’s a whole documentary about him called Proceed and Be Bold.
Roses (and pansies) in the salad
I took out a few stamp pads and the leftover ends of some chopped peppers from our dinner salad the other night and made these pepper prints for fun. (One of the peppers when printed looked remarkably like a pansy!)
The Italian designer Bruno Munari published a little book called Roses in the Salad dedicated to this technique of turning chopped vegetables into stamps:
Here are some pages:
The whole Munari “Workshop” series is wonderful — check out also Drawing a Tree, Drawing The Sun, and The Tactile Workshops. (There are two others in the series, but the English editions are out-of-print: A Flower with Love and Original Xerographies.) Anything of Munari’s you can get your hands on is worth it…