Chocolate Books

We're in action! My plan is to try and teach classes at McGuffey during the Fall and Winter and then to do Festivals and Art Fairs during the Spring and Summer. Before this can even be attempted, one needs products to market. There is a market for fine art and such at these things but it's mostly a pedestrian market where people will more openly part with a bit of cash for a nick-nack. I figure that my letterhead and bound books would fit nicely here. Here is the beginnings of my attempts with the I Love Chocolate Journal. I carved this block of poplar after finding that linoleum didn't offer me the precision I wanted. The design really pushed the limitations of poplar as some of the hand carved letters are as big as the fibers of wood themselves. In the long run, the poplar was a hair more detailed than the linoleum but this is lost when accounting for the fact that the grain prints up. Cherry or Maple you say? Maybe so but Poplar was faster to carve through and easy to get and as far as I know, sustainable to this area. It's an experiment and not altogether unsuccessful. The prints definately have a rustic feel to them. My Vandy is a manual hand roll press and thus there are variations but I am slowly but surely beginning to like variation. I will never, however, call outright mistakes and blunders a "beautiful variant." That's just sacrificing quality. Anyways, after tweaking out some trouble spots, I finally got a good print run going and now I'm eager to carve and print up a title plate! I can't wait to see how it turns out. Even the ink looks like chocolate!