Winnall Moors Woodcut

On an old piece of plywood that has been knocking around in our shed for the last 20 years I have drawn out the design for a woodcut.

Taken from a scanned drawing, reversed in Adobe Photoshop,I rubbed graphite onto the back of the photocopy and traced the image onto the plywood with a hard pencil. 

 The design includes my handwritten list of some of the bird species seen on Winnall Moors on the day I made the sketch. Carving these, backwards, into the plywood was a painstaking and lengthy process. You can make out Water Rail, Kingfisher, Siskin, Sparrowhawk...

After several hours the woodcut is ready. Two coats of quick-drying varnish seal the wood so that it doesn't absorb the ink and become degraded.  I now need to wait until Tuesday when I can get back into the print workshop to make an edition of prints from this block. I think I will make an edition of 25 and sell them at the WSA Book Day event on 7 March. 

I find this kind of manual artisan process satisfying. As the son of a carpenter/joiner and the grandson of a farrier, it may be in my blood.