PBI 2014: Guest Blogger Charlie Wisseman and Printing in Relief

Charlie Wisseman is a retired pathologist who now does mixed media art with a current emphasis on book arts and papermaking. Charlie creates some rather amazing works of art, and I encourage you to visit his website and looks at some of the pictures: www.charleswisseman.com. Charlie took a printmaking class at Paper and Book Intensive this year and agreed to share some of his thoughts about it here on my blog.

Ryan O'Malley, assistant professor at Texas A&M in Corpus Christi,Texas, taught a class in reduction relief printmaking at Paper and Book Intensive in May 2014 at Ox-Bow. As a first-time printmaker with no graphic training or drawing skill, I was a little worried going into this class, especially after seeing the amazing work that Ryan brought to show. His aesthetic is darker and more graphic-novel-like than my usual taste, but the work is dense and graphically powerful enough to pull any viewer in. I chose a graphic from a book to use as my image, and did fine.

Charlie's reduction print made in this class

Ryan taught us the basics of reduction printmaking using carved MDF panels with red and black colors on white base paper. This process is simple and cheap enough for me to play with at home, using an old etching press that a friend passed on to me. I do not aspire to have the astonishing speed and control of carving that Ryan demonstrates, but this is definitely a beginner-friendly process. Ryan was available until late every evening to help, and always willing to assist with corrective carving. By the end I was becoming almost too aggressive with the carving tools. Easy to remove material, but difficult to correct mistakes!

A few of Ryan's printing blocks.

A display of the prints made by the students in this class.

Ryan showed us a simple registration system using Ternes Burton registration pins taped to a jig, affectionately known as "Frenchy". Experience with students has taught Ryan to add some protections to prevent accidentally running Frenchy through the press. As a bonus, Ryan showed me how to print my brain image onto a tee shirt. The print I brought home looks great. My only regret is that the reduction process of carving the block between colors means that there is no going back to do any more complete prints. Only the portion of the image for the final color remains, but the block itself is worth framing.

- Charles Wisseman

Barn Owl Notebooks

I like carving linoleum and rubber stamps even though I don't seem to have much time for it. Last week, though, I found time to make this Barn Owl stamp to use on notebook covers.


I also did some Snowy Owl sketches and may try him next. But for now, if you're in the Halifax area, these small Barn Owl notebooks are now available at Inkwell Boutique.

A Japanese Account Book

The very first bookbinding book that I got, was the "Japanese Bookbinding" book by Ikegami. I was entirely impressed with all the history included in this book and I read every word and made every project. One of my favorite notebook structures from this book is this simple account book structure. This structure is called daifuku chō and it was used during the Edo period (1603-1868) for travel diaries, guest registers, and primarily as merchant account books (Ikegami p.68). Ikegami includes a photograph of an account book from the mid-1800s and that always catches my attention when I go through his book.

So a while back, I decided that I would try to replicate the "look" of that mid-1800s current-accounts book. The first thing I had to do, was figure out how to recreate the Japanese calligraphy. Since I'm not a calligrapher, and know nothing of Japanese writing at all, I had to figure out something that I could manage. So I carved some rubber stamps to recreate the Japanese characters on the cover.

I really don't know what they mean. Ikegami's text suggests that they would embellish the cover with the characters for "great fortune" but I don't know if this example follows that trend. I did speak to someone who knew a bit more than I, and she believed that the character on the bottom was the character for "account book." If any of my readers can enlighten me about the others, I'd love to hear from you!

Once I had my Japanese character stamps ready, I stamped them onto some cream handmade paper and added some little hand-drawn characters as well. The cover paper and the pages were then aged, and then I bound the books together using linen twine.

There is a long braided piece extending from the spine at the top of the book. Ikegami writes that completed ledgers might have been strung together and tied to a long cord so that in case of an emergency, such as a fire, the merchant could easily grab all his account books at once and toss them to safety.

I've been printing lino again

Recently I spent an evening making prints of some of my favorite lino cuts and rubber stamps that I've made. Some of the prints are being used for notebooks like these. Black and white chopstick notebooks with grey flowers... My picnic table and wooden swing lino prints. The peach and green covers are some of the paper I made a couple months ago. Images are printed in brown ink. These notebooks are bound with a simple 2-section sewing. And some simple pink and white notebooks with flowers printed in gold-coloured ink.

Special Edition CD

Cephalectomy is a Nova Scotia band and they recently released a new CD, The Dream Cycle Mythos. I have designed and constructed this special edition for them: a drop-back box in full black sheepskin leather. This special numbered edition is available through the band's label, Discorporate Music.


I hand printed their logo on the cover and on the insert, using a lino cut that I created for this project.



The insert is a folded wrapper structure with a tab closure and it contains the graphics and lyrics as well as a certificate of authenticity.


If you're wondering what kind of music is inside this box, Cephalectomy's new release is described thus: "The Dream Cycle Mythos" shatters dreams and brims with an originality that is sorely absent from other releases in the death/grind genre. No stones are left unturned on this musical masterpiece -- it is a single song that stretches beyond the 23-minute mark. Thunderous blast beats transition to extreme melody, off-time riffs, heavy metal crunch, and even sprinklings of classic rock. However, metal is the name of the game here with Cephalectomy's fourth official release for Discorporate Music. The lyrics spin a tale of a clearly unstable mind as it experiences new dimensions and the horrifying visions within.

I should get a Yink, I think

This one, I think, is called a Yink.
He likes to wink, he likes to drink.

He likes to drink, and drink, and drink.
The thing he likes to drink is ink.
The ink he likes to drink is pink.
He likes to wink and drink pink ink.

SO... if you have a lot of ink,
then you should get a Yink, I think.
- Dr. Suess

So I utilized my newly acquired printmaking skills to do some more carving and printing. So I printed some gold flowers on the covers of these pink chopstick notebooks.

I'm still learning here. I noticed that my Speedball inks dry a lot faster than the Daniel Smith inks. My prints made with Daniel Smith ink seem to be smoother, though. The prints I made using the speedball inks seem to have a grainy texture. Maybe it's just the difference with paper absorbency. Or is there a hierarchy in the world of printing inks? Which is better? Or is it all just personal preference in these situations?

Printmaking, for real

So, rubber stamps weren't the only thing we did in our printmaking course. Oh no, not at all. In fact, we covered so many things, I could barely take notes fast enough. The scope of the course included: lino prints, reduction printing, dark field monotype printing, trace-style monotypes, pressure prints, painted monotypes, a bit of colophon printing, and of course, screen printing. Then we covered some fun folding book structures at the end, which is a great way to visualize the process in the realm of book arts. This first picture shows Matt demonstrating the silk screen printing process.

The greatest bonus with silk screen printing is the ability to create many many many prints - once the screen is prepared, making the actual prints is slick and quick. As a class, we created a screen for printing some two-sided origami paper. I think there were a million prints made...or maybe about 50...something like that. Everyone was able to take a few sheets anyway. Matt showed us how to use a dark room and light table for exposing the screens, and then also showed us how to do it just by exposing the screen in direct sunlight for a couple minutes. So it can be done without too much special gear...that's nice to know. Although I don't think I'll take up screen printing.

I tried reduction printing, and stencil printing, and a couple monotype prints. But I found that I was most drawn to creating printing blocks with linoleum. I decided to create a few related images, resulting in these "Reminders of my Grandfather."




During the course, I created about half a dozen of these lino cuts. The last photo shows some of the linoleum blocks with the prints. We had access to a couple printing presses, but we also printed by hand without a press. The beauty of this being, that I can print them again...! Seems like a really basic concept, but it actually took a couple days before I understood this fully. I've already been to the art store to buy some ink and a brayer and more linoleum... I'm looking forward to using some of these new things in my books.

Printmaking, the beginning

The last half of my PBI session was about printmaking. The instructor was Matt Liddle and he spent a lot of time the first couple days demonstrating a million different techniques and showing us samples and all that good stuff. Here he is, showing us one of his pieces, which is a reduction wood cut. He has the final wood block there as well as one of the finished prints.


I had never done anything like this before and was a bit concerned about that lack of experience as I think all the other people in the class had at least a bit of exposure to it. But of course, there was nothing to be concerned about! We started by making some rubber stamps - Matt does some amazing things with his rubber stamps, creating extensive and detailed landscapes and graphic stories, often in book format. My stamps were really simple, but it was a great way to get quick results on my first day of printmaking class!


And apparently printers used to make themselves hats from a sheet of newspaper...so we made ourselves some printer's hats and stamped them using our new rubber stamps. Mine is on the left, the right shows a few of the other paper hat designs and stamps made by others in the class.


And, AshvilleBookGirl was in my printmaking class too! It was great to meet you Clara, and so glad we had a class together!