Wood Engraving Research Articles

Experimental Analysis and Process Parameter Optimization of Wooden Material on Wood Router

Abstract: The area of customize design gave rise to different machines. Wood engraving or wood router machine is one of the development which can be used to perform operations like drilling, engraving, cutting etc on materials like wood, plastics, acrylics, PCB board etc. This paper discusses the effect of variable factors like spindle speed, feed rate and thickness of material on surface roughness and surface roundness of engraved surface. To calculate roundness or circularity of engraved surface coordinate measuring machine Zeiss Contura G2 is used that has least count of 0.0019 mm. For calculating roughness surface roughness tester MITITOYO SJ 210 is used that has least count of 0.0019 mm. It is found that machine shows 99.8% accuracy for diameter and 99.4% accuracy for height achieved.

Spades and Gravers: Clare Leighton, Victor Gollancz and the Radical Countryside

Socialist artist, wood engraver, and writer Clare Leighton transformed the interwar wood engraving revival from a niche movement within fine book publishing into an everyday art for the people when in 1935 she brought out with leftist publisher Victor Gollancz her authored and illustrated Four Hedges: A Gardener's Chronicle. Read alongside Country Matters (1937), a second illustrated countryside book that Gollancz commissioned from Leighton, Four Hedges becomes a key 1930s text because it realigns modernist values associated with the wood engraved productions of small presses with the more democratic values of mass-reproduced trade books. Combining feminist biography, close reading, and modernist and middlebrow book history, this article argues that the wood engraved books that Gollancz commissioned from Leighton contribute to rather than resist or exist outside of the radical 1930s once they are located within Leighton's rural arts practice and Gollancz's publishing ventures, including his publication of George Orwell's legendary urban documentary, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).

The Wood Engravers' Self-Portrait: The Dalziel Archive and Victorian Illustration by Bethan Stevens (review)

The Wood Engravers' Self-Portrait: The Dalziel Archive and Victorian Illustration by Bethan Stevens (review)

The Artists of the Atlas: Their Role in Creating Settler-Colonial Australia’s Visual Culture

ABSTRACTDiscussions of Australian art in the run-up to Federation have long focused on the iconic works of Melbourne’s leading impressionist painters. However, it was the wood-engraved pictures of settler-colonial Australia’s illustrated press, especially in Sydney, that dominated its visual culture in the second half of the 19th century. Between 1885 and 1900, the influence of Sydney’s artist-illustrators reached new heights, thanks to the appearance of the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia. This extravagantly illustrated publication was widely hailed as marking “the birth of art beneath the Southern Cross”. The artists of the Atlas succeeded not only in consolidating a settler-colonial iconography of Australia’s history, achievements and prospects but also in disseminating it through their later work for the Sydney Mail, the London Graphic and the Bulletin. Led by Julian Ashton, they transformed Sydney into the epicentre of Australian settler art, drawing Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton into their orbit by the 1890s. Following the illustrated press’s abandonment of wood engraving, these artists continued to influence Australia’s visual culture via other media up to and including the First World War. Revisiting Sydney’s golden age of illustration offers a new window onto the art most Australians saw.

Moonlight


 
 
 The moon is the biggest object in the night sky. Its light has always fascinated. That special quality of light invites all kinds of superstition, from the healing power of the waning moon to good luck during full moon, from disabled children to pots of gold. Sometimes the moon appears blue, white, yellow or red. In the middle of the night, its light turns everything silver. How can we make an analogue print on paper and capture this ever- changing companion of our lives? How can we show the fickle quality of moonlight? In this paper we explain why the moon has so many colours but is mostly seen as silver to the human eye and we chart the progress of our attempts to translate this special optical feature into print by exploring different ink formulations, and their influence on the optical appearance of a wood engraving of the moon.
 
 

Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song: Three Illustrators, Three Readings of Image and Text

Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song:Three Illustrators, Three Readings of Image and Text Isobel Armstrong (bio) How does one think about an illustrated poem? Does the illustration belong to the poem or the poem to the illustration? The etymological derivation of "illustration" is from Latin illustrare—il + lustrare—to shed light, to illuminate, to light up. The sense of illustration as a text plus drawing did not emerge until the mid-seventeenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The meaning of illustration is strangely equivocal: logically the text is prior to its illustration—it gives instructions to the artist—but secondary in the illustration's capacity to light up the prior text. The image is the thing we see first, the primary exponent of meaning. It makes immediate visual claims on the reader—certainly in the case of Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song—almost before the text is absorbed. The illustration appears to throw light on the poem, but the poem also "explains" the illustration; and yet it may well be an explanation that is limited, posthumously as it were, by the illustration itself. Each exercises a limit on the other. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, the pioneering scholar of Rossetti illustration, has found a fertile language for this relation: she writes of Sing-Song's illustrations as "composites," texts with a "reciprocal" relation to each other, in dialogue, dialogical.1 I want to pursue this reciprocity by asking a further question: What does an illustration illustrate? There is no simple deictic relation between image and text. The animate world of the nursery rhyme, where animals and plants abut on the human world and where language plays with the acoustics of pun, riddle, nonsense, and the rhythms of the body, making use of nonsemantic sound and prosodic patterns of rhyme and assonance outside representation, can hardly be "translated" into the visual. Constance Hassett writes eloquently of the phonemic "delirium," for instance, of the fifth poem in Sing-Song, its "Kookoorookoo!" and "Kikirikee! kikirikee!"2 It is a world where the sensory and somatic qualities of words are ends in themselves. What sort of interrelation can there be between sheer sound and image? That is the problem for all [End Page 547] images claiming to represent language. For Jacques Rancière the image, is always problematical because the image is intrinsically cleft into two elements when it claims mimetic correspondence. While it can stand in for likeness to an original by lines and brush strokes, it is not what it images. Thus its double nature as resemblance and dissemblance means an oscillation between likeness and alterity. But language, too, is subject to this same coupling and uncoupling oscillation: signifiers are arbitrarily linked to the sound-signified, and yet they possess a "blinding" visibility for us, fused with what we think they represent, the sayable and the visible under the same rubric.3 So if language and images come together, if images claim to represent writing, a text, rather than objects in the world, that relation is bound to be complex. Some of these questions can be addressed because Sing-Song acquired not one but three illustrators—Christina Rossetti, Arthur Hughes, and Alice Boyd—and the play between them helps to show what an illustration can be. Or rather, it discloses three quite different forms of illustration, three Victorian modes of approaching image and text. Each one changes the poem in subtle ways. I call these emblematic, narratorial, and performative modes of illustration. Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song was published in 1872, with illustrations by Arthur Hughes brought into being by the facsimile wood engravings of the Dalziel Brothers.4 Rossetti herself illustrated her fair copy manuscript of Sing-Song with small figures placed above the text—she called these her "scratches."5 This makes the "meaning" of the book's illustrations complex enough, particularly as we might properly think of the Dalziel firm's unknown wood engravers, who turned a drawing into a print and were wholly responsible for mediating its end product, as more than proxy illustrators. These have recently been characterized, indeed, as "ghost writers," their critical functions recognized as an essential element of print illustration.6 I bracket the...

Visions et divisions: Discours culturels de "Punch" et ordre social victorien (1850–1880) by Françoise Baillet

Reviewed by: Visions et divisions: Discours culturels de "Punch" et ordre social victorien (1850–1880) by Françoise Baillet Eloïse Forestier (bio) Françoise Baillet, Visions et divisions: Discours culturels de "Punch" et ordre social victorien (1850–1880) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2022), pp. 254, €30 paperback. Another study of Punch! And in French, no less. In Visions et divisions: Discours culturels de Punch et ordre social victorien (1850–1880), Françoise Baillet treats us to the visual delights of this monument of art, humour, and social insight, the British weekly satirical periodical Punch, or the London Charivari, launched in 1841 by Henry Mayhew, Mark Lemon, and wood engraver Ebenezer Landells. This fresh scholarly plunge into the scene and beyond the printed page follows the rising tradition of editor studies, or the study of that network of minds and affiliations that lies behind the production of a single periodical, instigated by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden in Investigating Victorian Journalism (1990) and more recently scrutinized for Punch by Patrick Leary in The Punch Brotherhood (2010). Brake and Leary apply group dimension and dynamics to the editorial agenda: no single "Mister Punch" perspective emerges, nor simply a report on Victorian times. Rather, a plurality of outlooks upon society lends a rich complexity to the relationship between the sketch artist(s), the reader, and the magazine itself. Taking into account these factors, Baillet focuses on the visual discourse of Punch, studying the subtle layers of significance between the drawing, the message, and the beholder. She chooses three decades of the mid-Victorian era (1850–80), the most conservative period of the Queen's reign but, at the same time, a period that was tested and tried by a series of societal and legal evolutions that shook the very foundations of Victorian society—a treasure of inspiration for the editors of Punch. Baillet's book is a well-balanced overview of both the content and production of Punch magazine. Divided into three parts that each contain two or three chapters (a table of contents would have been nice), the book focuses on three major issues that rattled the order and propriety of Victorian codes: social class movement, women, and the figure of the artist. All three themes presented a threat to a wishfully well-ordained society ruled by work, morality, and masculinity, a vision that the conservative male sketch artist editors of Punch also strongly supported and strove to maintain. Baillet demonstrates that the humour of the magazine is based on a kind of dystopia imagined along the clear-cut lines of Victorian values confronted with the changes of time: aristocratic idlers against time-constrained commoners, the Angel in the House against rising feminism, the responsibilities of citizenship against the violent-drunk recipient of these honours, or respectable society itself infected by the dilettante and the dandy. The stroke of pen and colouring have much to do with the art [End Page 467] of Punch. Straight lines, fine features, and clear colouring for masculinity, respectability, and honesty contrast with curves, thick features, and blurred lines and colouring for femininity, frailty, awkwardness, and deviousness. The clueless aristocrat fumbles his way through working London, women are given attributes of power and production while their distraught husbands are left with the duties of the household, the murderous working-class ruffian is given light justice and the right to vote, and the failed artist puffs his way around simpering salon loiterers. A mild yet certain sense of wrongness, which Baillet insightfully describes, pervades each of these vignettes. Thus she gives us in a nutshell the measure of the magazine's wit but also a clear perspective of what Victorian society defended for a certain type of reader (upper-middle- and upper-class white, predominantly male) through the eyes of similar-minded sketch artists. By exaggerating the traits and distorting reality to an extreme, for readers who shared the fears and concerns of the editors, the sketches of the magazine could provoke soothing laughter. With hindsight, and Baillet's help, they still do. One of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in a study of caricatures is to avoid doing the very thing they...

English

The relief printmaking process is essentially expressed in woodcut, wood engraving and linocut, as well as some unconventional media. In this process, linocut is the preferred option, especially, by beginners, because linoleum is soft and easy to manipulate. However, the scarcity and high cost of linoleum in Nigeria present difficulties in carrying out exercises in the material. Based on this, it becomes expedient to look for alternatives, and the elastomer comes in handy as a feasible option. This paper is a comprehensive account of the studio experiences. It was an attempt to offer the elastomer as a feasible alternative to linoleum in the relief printmaking process. The objectives were to present the elastomer as a genuine substitute to linoleum, to unearth the weaknesses and strengths of elastomer against linoleum through studio experiments, and to identify the challenges of using elastomers in the relief printmaking process as well as possible ways of surmounting these challenges. The qualitative research method, through the studio experimental procedure was adopted in the investigation. Results showed that elastomers were not only good alternatives to linoleum, but were, indeed, capable of offering finer and more delicate cuttings than were attainable with linoleum.   Key words: Elastomer, linoleum, alternative, relief printmaking, weaknesses, strengths. 

Gillotage. Exploring a mid-nineteenth century relief printing technique


 
 
 Gillotage, a relief printing method used in nineteenth century commercial industry, consists of using a lithographic transfer of an image drawn and processed on stone to a metal plate, while avoiding undercutting the raised areas of the design needed to obtain a relief printing plate. Gillotage was a first option when it came to reproducing an illustration in a commercial sphere, being a cheaper alternative to relief printing methods such as wood engraving. This article wrestles with a fundamental problem: is it possible to recreate the material conditions, interpretations and successful printing outcomes as present in original gillotage? How to contend with the unfortunate demands of historical and unfamiliar technologies of reproduction and adapt them to a contemporary practice? Can a project based on an obsolete printing technique used with letterpress printing demonstrate how to engage researchers and students in new printing approaches?
 Our technological reconstruction helped us to better understand the materials and components of gillotage, the aesthetic and tactile qualities achieved by these methods which have not entered a printmaking studio. Nevertheless, such operational circumstances may thus be understood as an invitation to experiment, contradicting the original use of making a print as a means to reproduce. We aim to get closer to an alternative printing matrix compatible with letterpress printing while developing methods to involve print practitioners in printing history and experiment with materials in their creative practice.
 
 

Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture: Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration by Brian Maidment

Reviewed by: Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture: Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration by Brian Maidment Jo Devereux Brian Maidment, Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture: Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. vii + 191, $128 hardcover, $39.16 e-book. As Brian Maidment points out in the introduction to Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture, there is no previous book-length study of Seymour other than a fictionalized biography, Stephen Jarvis's Death and Mr. Pickwick (2014). Maidment's excellent book therefore fills a significant gap. This gap is surprising, given the relatively large number of studies of other nineteenth-century caricaturists, such as John Tenniel, John Leech, and Hablot K. Browne. George Cruikshank and Linley Sambourne have also been accorded biographies and critical books, but Seymour has been overlooked and his work overshadowed by his association with Charles Dickens. Indeed, Maidment notes that critics have tended to focus only on The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), ignoring the rest of Seymour's considerable oeuvre. The "miscellaneous" nature of most accounts leaves much to be learned about the artist (14). They also obscure the political aspects of his work, much of which was engaged with radical politics. By contrast, Maidment's book thoughtfully examines the relationship between Seymour's illustrations and Regency print culture. It also looks beyond the narrow scope of Pickwick to consider Seymour's influence on the history of comic illustration and comic journalism, arguing that Seymour was particularly important during the 1820s and 1830s when print culture was undergoing profound change. The chapters that follow usefully divide up Seymour's canon and examine specific publications with an eye to their historical significance. Chapter 1, "Getting to Know Seymour," provides a detailed history of Seymour's career, something which has been missing from the art historical record. Noting that Seymour's caricatures are still used to embody the political and social milieu of the 1830s, Maidment discusses Seymour's move away from wood engraving toward etching and lithography as the more "personally satisfying media" (10). He also traces the economic pressures that Seymour experienced as a jobbing illustrator. Chapter 2 examines Seymour's relationship with his publishers, Knight and Lacey and later William Kidd. This chapter explains the arduous life of jobbing engravers and suggests that Seymour's career was largely shaped by his relationships with the London-based publishers and with other publishers, such as Thomas McLean, William Strange, and Effingham Wilson. The book proves a valuable history of these significant yet often obscure figures who shaped nineteenth-century print culture in profound ways. For one thing, [End Page 142] they were instrumental in the development of illustrated periodicals. This development was driven by commercialism and profit, of course, but it also met the demands of readers for miscellanies and collections of snippets of information, stories, and history. In his career, Seymour proved able to work in various reprographic media. Chapter 3, "Social Satires," considers Seymour's use of lithography and his single-plate graphic satires. In this section of the book, Maidment discusses Seymour's engagement with issues of technological advances and the effects of mechanization on social structures. He examines the ways in which Seymour's illustrations combined political and social caricature, and he notes the fact that Seymour used many mediums for his work, including wood engraving, lithography, and etching. While Seymour had to work within the confines of the political views of his publishers, he still held and expressed clear views on issues such as reform. Focusing on specific images, Maidment analyses such elements as the night soil cart and the absorbed reader: "If the graphic trope of the dangerously absorbed reader was a relatively new one when Seymour adopted it in 1832, the ragged procession that forms the backdrop to the night soil cart incident drew on an older graphic vocabulary" (53). Maidment convincingly argues that Seymour used the trope of the absorbed reader and that of the ragged procession to satirize magazines of the time in a kind of metatextual approach to caricature. Maidment points out that Seymour's satire was not straightforward, even if it sometimes seems reactionary and harsh on the...

Desenvolvimento de uma máquina fresadora CNC multifunção de baixo custo

The purpose of this work is to model, simulate and build a smaller and cheaper alternative to CNC machines available on the market that is also sufficiently rigid to machine metals such as aluminum and brass, for application in plate cutting and machining small three-dimensional parts. Therefore, the objective is to show the development and construction of a multifunction CNC milling machine (for milling, wood engraving, laser cutting and laser engraving), to obtain a low cost and easy to operate equipment. The project methodology is based on a literature review on the milling process and research on commercial machines. Subsequently, the design of the equipment and the selection of components is carried out. Finally, after finishing construction, the machine was subjected to tests, through which it was possible to assess its functionality and performance. The development of the machine achieved all the desired purposes, such as movement in three axes and the exchangeable head, a robust equipment (maximum deformation 0,3166 mm), which proved to be functional, simple to operate and with a total cost at around 50% less than the cheapest machine analyzed.

“Thief in the Name of Kidd”: Unscrupulous Opportunism and Cheap Print in Late Regency London

William Kidd saw himself as a struggling small publisher of illustrated books operating during the 1830s in a marketplace that favoured large scale firms. His response to his perceived disadvantages was twofold. In seeking to reach a rapidly expanding cohort of leisure-based readers, Kidd deployed aggressive marketing policies that frequently sailed close to the law and generated considerable controversy. He was also less than honest about just who had written or illustrated his books. At the same time, he initiated new genres of relatively cheap illustrated publications based on the recreational interest and habits of an emerging lower middle class and artisan reading public. In particular, he took advantage of the wood engraving as a cheap reprographic medium, and employed highly capable draughtsmen such as Robert Cruikshank, Robert Seymour and George Bonner to illustrate his books and pamphlets. His pocket guides to British seaside resorts, his development of the illustrated reprints known as jeu d’esprit or Facetiae and his packaging up of sayings, mottos and nuggets of information into small format gatherings all show a lively minded and innovative response to the rapidly changing literary marketplace. Kidd’s career suggests both the legally chaotic nature of the literary marketplace and the entrepreneurial opportunities offered to a shrewd if unscrupulous publisher in late Regency London.

Blake and Exhibitions, 2020

2020 exhibitions placed Blake within artistic traditions of drawing in The Artful Line at the Harris and of wood engraving in Scene through Wood at the Ashmolean. His role within a surrealist genealogy was reinterpreted in British Surrealism at Dulwich Picture Gallery, which took the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 as a starting point and measured its impact on British surrealists since then. Facsimiles of his Gray watercolors were the inspiration for contemporary poets in The Bard: William Blake at Flat Time House. While the Tate retrospective reconstructed Blake’s coordinates through a very detailed account of the artisanal, artistic, and commercial communities around him in his several London locations, The Bard rooted Blake in Peckham, reenergizing creative and critical psychogeographic approaches. Trianon Press facsimiles were put to different uses, prompting reflection on the role of reproduction as a medium that can extend the circulation of Blake and bypassing the conservation restrictions that limit the exposure of works and require intervals between loans, as well as other conditions relating to the loan of originals. As noted, unbound Trianon facsimiles facilitated a dialogue with contemporary poetic practice at Flat Time House. The National Gallery of Canada’s William Blake, 1757–​1827: Illustrated Books used them to juxtapose originals and copies, enabling comparisons between monochrome and color versions and between technologies of print and reproduction, while also documenting the archival practice of complementing originals with reproductions.

Effect of CO2 laser parameters on redwood engraving process complemented by Taguchi method

Laser deep engraving is one of the most promising technologies to be used in wood engraving operations. In this method, a laser beam is used to ablate a solid wood bulk, following predetermined patterns. The sculpture is obtained by repeating this process on each successive thin layer. The degree of precision of the shape, the removal rate, and the surface quality during the engraving process strictly depends on the materials properties, the laser source characteristics, and the laser parameters. This work investigates the influence of the process parameters on the material removal rates by engraving redwood using a co 2 laser working with a wavelength λ = 10.6 µm. The examined parameters were: the laser power, the scanning speed, and line overlapping space; each of them has a different value (20, 25, 30, 35, and 40 W), (100, 300, 500, 700, 1000 mm min −1 ) and (0.03, 0.06, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 mm) respectively. The working parameters were designed using the L25 Taguchi methodology for the design of the experiment. Experimental results showed that the co 2 laser could successfully engrave the redwood, obtaining different engraving depths. The maximum and minimum depth obtained was 4.25 mm and 0.01 mm. the results show that the engraving depth interaction changes depending on the laser parameters.

"You Shall Look at This or at Nothing": Gaylord Schanilec and the Value of the Fine Press Book

"You Shall Look at This or at Nothing":Gaylord Schanilec and the Value of the Fine Press Book Alexa Hazel (bio) American writer, engraver, and printer Gaylord Schanilec's (1955–) Lac des pleurs1 arrives at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading Room in a nondescript box. The box is placed on a spacious map table in a wood-paneled and carpeted room. The readers seem serious and well-dressed. Foam cushions are set aside, as are paperweights. The librarian adjusts a sophisticated spotlight. The viewer unfolds a first layer of casing to reveal Lac's custom-made, burgundy cloth box. The gray-green Roman typeface of the book's title,2 drawn, I later learn, by Schanilec's contemporary, the typographer, writer, and printer Russell Maret (1971–), is shadowed by softer gray lines. The spine, in a leathery deep-water blue, features a small pelican. The fabric slides apart to reveal a pale blue interior and the book's smooth cover, a marbled constellation of greens, yellows, and burgundies. The ripple-disturbed front is both surface and depth, solid and ephemeral, and each rock or spot of light calls for the reader's attention. The overall experience is astounding—like opening a box of treasure. Schanilec, described in some fine-press circles as the "preeminent multi-chromatic wood engraver,"3 explores and reproduces—in text and image—what he finds in the natural world: insects, birds, trees, the flora and fauna of the Mississippi River's Lake Pepin, a waterfall, and, most recently, urban flowers. Like "naturalism" in Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy,4 in Mayflies of the Driftless Region (2005), Sylvæ (2007), and Lac (2015), Schanilec's style is not an attempt to imitate nature, but rather the fruit of "a feeling for the beauty of organic form": a desire "to feel himself into" the "happiness of the organically alive."5 His voice is diffident and exploratory, and is as subtle as his use of color. What are his art objects? They elude easy classification. Simultaneously text—poetry, anecdotes, arguments—and image, we can appreciate them as paintings and yet handle them as books. They evoke the British "private [End Page 146] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The cover and box of Schanilec's Lac des pleurs (Stockholm, Wisconsin: Midnight Paper Sales, 2015). Schanilec printed one hundred copies of Lac, originally priced at $5,000, after seven years of research and production. press" tradition, of which the Daniel Press, T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker's Doves Press, William Morris's Kelmscott Press, and St John Hornby's Ashendene Press are the most famous exemplars. Both Schanilec and Maret draw on these pioneers for inspiration, share their élan and at least part of their vision, and approach bookmaking with equivalent solemnity. The "private press" movement is nevertheless geographically and historically situated: a nineteenth-century reaction to industrialization. The term would be an anachronism if applied to contemporary work. Both artists also understand their creative activities with reference to the American press revival of the mid-1970s, when letterpress printing machines—technology that dates to the fifteenth century—became increasingly obsolete, freed from their use value, and thus cheap, and the American "book arts" movement acquired the technical means to flourish.6 A [End Page 147] chronicler and practitioner of the craft, Johanna Drucker, suggests, perhaps overoptimistically, that the twentieth century was the "century of artists' books."7 "Artists' books" are works of art, not representations of works of art, and their creators concern themselves, thematically or aesthetically, with the process of the book's production.8 Yet because "artists' books" encompasses a range of artistic experimentation within and beyond the book's codex structure, from origami to pop-up books, the term suggests too much to serve as an adequate description for Schanilec's objects. If "private press" is an anachronism, "artists' books" is too imprecise. When I asked Maret to classify the objects that he and Schanilec make, he proposed two terms: "third stream books" or "fine press artist books." "Third stream," coined by composer Gunther Schuller, originally referred to a synthesis of jazz and classical music. Sandra Kirshenbaum, in Five...

Fabrication of Portable Pantograph for Wood Engraving

Fabrication of Portable Pantograph for Wood Engraving

The Multiple Capabilities of Printing Block in Relief Engraving

The wooden blocks represented the largest share of engraving along the history of this art. Wooden blocks were used in the form of cylinder seals, then blocks to be printed on fabrics. The first blocks were used for printing the Buddhism instructions, then paper appeared and the techniques of wood engraving were evolved to be ranging between relief engraving vertically or horizontally. The most important periods of evolution; was the Expressionism specially at Germans for what they introduced special artistic characteristics as feeling communication and direct expression and the characteristics of the Relief engraving of easy application in limited spaces and simplicity of preparations compared to other media that require much preparation. What are the multiple capabilities of a printing block in Relief engraving to get different results that bear the same visual values without prejudice to the characteristic of artistic print? The researcher outlined all the difficulties and disadvantages through an idea in one panoramic artwork consists of 3 parts using his special symbols like trees that connect the artistic factors in the artwork to represent life in the shape of the trees from which life begins and to which life ends _as stated in old civilizations_ and using other elements like a man who stands in the center of the artwork and the birds (i.e.: ostriches, goose) and fishes. All these elements represent the symbols and protagonists who steer the events producing this combined artwork so called “Subservience & Submissiveness”. The dominant idea of the gallery is highlighting how far we could benefit from printmaking and its blocks and pinpointing its capabilities of the multi visions in the same artwork. It is a “One Artwork Gallery” through utilizing these capabilities and pinpointing them to reach visual values in each work separately. The researcher presented the basic artwork through three blocks each of which is 70×80 cm in size and combined in a spacious area of 120×80 cm developing a panoramic combined artwork of which each part provides a different vision.

At War: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Maiden Newton

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1958 poetry collection Boxwood is an unusual book with an unusual genesis. This article examines how Warner and her neighbour, the wood engraver Reynolds Stone, collaborated on the project. It explores Warner’s meditations on rural life, storytelling and human mortality in the wider contexts of her own poetry and the history of British wood engraving.

Design and fabrication of a CNC router machine for wood engraving

The purpose of this research was to designing and fabrication a Computer Numerical Control (CNC) based router machine for wood engraving machine. The idea behind this research was to help the traditional woods craft men in Bali to make a craft more productive and more efficient. The router machine that is made is driven by the driver in the form of a stepper motor, with a 3 axis motion so that the results of wood engraving obtained are precision and homogeneous. G-code program used on CAM processing uses MACH 3 software. The workspace of the machine was 800 mm x 500 mm. The stepper motor driven with TB 6600 driver and combined with ball screw on linear bearing to make the motion more precisely. The test result showed that the machine accuracy is about 99.5 percent for X and Y axis and 96 percent for Z axis.

Liang-Qiu Lu.

"My first experiment was to prepare a new chiral bifunctional organocatalyst which was designed by myself. Chemistry is fun because whatever you find, you will benefit by gaining new knowledge …" Find out more about Liang-Qiu Lu in his Author Profile.