Oh, oh, the Ammonite!
I’m hearing the Bob Marley song, ‘The Israelite,’ as I make fabric prints from this CNC-carved wood block made by Tony Bevis. There is a whole little ammonite sub-culture here in the Pikes Peak Region. Kim Lacy has been using the ammonite shape in her prize-winning art quilts for several years. Dennis saw these, and wanted to carve one on a huge maple burl disk he has turned. Our friend, Tony, is a neighbor of Kim’s, and started looking for an image to carve with his CNC router. He cut four different sizes of the image. I am lucky to have two much smaller ones for block printing experiments.
The easiest transfer to fabric is a simple rubbing to pick up a ‘white line’ print of the carved areas of the block. For this black quilt, I quilted the lines first, and then painted inside them. Some black-on-black texture comes from a stencil, and from hand embroidery.
I liked the stencil of the pebbles enough to add it to the wood block with spackling. Technically, the block became a colograph at this point, and it was perfect for a new step in the game – using a gelli plate as an inking surface. I applied the paint in a very wet condition, pressed the block into the ink, and lifted it off. The thickness of the paint created a ‘denditric’ texture. This print is from the block, not the gelli plate– black ink on white cotton sateen. I then painted over the dried print with transparent acrylics from CMYK colors – the base colors for inkjet printing. Perhaps we are unaware just how much this 4-color printing process has shaped our color sense!
Tags: ammonite, colograph, woodblockprint