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| From Goody O’Grumpity |
On a recent visit to the Mazza Museum (which collects original children’s book illustrations) in Findlay, Ohio I discovered Ashley Wolff’s linocut Childrens book illustrations. In Goody O’Grumpity (1994) and in Who’s coming to our house (1988) she hand coloured her linocuts with watercolour. She does it beautifully – if you click on one of her images you can see it enlarged.
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| From Who’s Coming To Our House |
Wolff (San Francisco) has illustrated many children’s books since, but none other in linocut. She told me the process is very laborious and the book she made in this style have gone out of print rapidly.
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| From Who’s Coming To Our House |
To me, that is amazing. I love that pre-war woodcut look.
Another artist/illustrator who likes it is Andrea Wisnewski.
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| Little Red Riding Hood |
Andrea Wisnewski (Connecticut, USA) makes papercuts (with an x-acto knife, I don’t think anyone out there is still using scissors) that she then prints. The prints look like woodcuts. She too hand colours them with watercolour. She developed this technique because woodcuts and linocuts take so much time.
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| Little Red Riding Hood |
Wisnewski runs the Running Rabbit Press, doing illustration, printmaking and design. She has illustrated for many great newspapers and magazines. In 2006 she published Little Red Riding Hood. Go here to see all her books.
Because I like the woodcut/linolook so much, I too came up wit a way to imitate it. I cut stamps and colour them in Photoshop.
To make a larger scene, you need a lot of stamps. But the process is relatively quick.
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| see weekly portrait |
Another way to get thick black outlines and a linolook is to use scratchboard, or ink a plate of glass and scratch the ink away before you use it as a printing plate. Or you can just fake the effect in Photoshop:
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| See De Gele Regenjas |
I filled a layer with black and scratched it away with a think pencil on my Wacom tablet.
A nice meditative job.
Bijzonder dat portret met de dame in de zwarte jurk! Lijkt wel een zeefdruk.
wolff's work is amazing — beautiful design and colour.
I can see I have alot of catching up to do on your posts! Lots of interesting stuff here.