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I am old.

11/10/2010

6 Comments

 
Turned 24 last week on a rather uneventful day (wake up. work. school. sleep). Celebrated the next night, and had a lot of fun! Low key, good food, good company, & harmless mischief (heehee).

And my loot! I'm not normally a materialistic person (I meeeean it)-
but my loot was amazing. Colin gave me a relief print of a Woodring drawing:

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It's seriously awesome.

It looks more awesome in person, because you can see all the small details. The work is titled "Squeaker in the Woods" (seen faintly on the bottom of the print). 

I like relief prints a lot and think they're amazing. Regarding prints, this was a series of 100 (as indicated in pencil on the lower left), and is the 83rd print in the series. The artist's signature is on the lower right.

I'll admit, I wasn't the best printmaker in school (or the best history of printmaking art history student!), but I can still appreciate this print for what it is!
Printmaking experts feel free to chime in and correct me on anything though...

First off, you can tell that it's a relief print, as opposed to an intaglio print, pretty easily.
A relief print (like woodcuts or linocuts) is done where the black/inked parts are what's left on the block, and the white part/uninked parts are carved out. Think of it like an ink stamp-- the raised parts of the stamp would get ink it when you smoosh it on an inkpad, the carved out parts don't get ink.

With all the small spaces of white and black in the print, it's amazing that it was done so neatly. Can you imagine carving out all those small spaces to create the white portions of the drawing? Or how to just leave a small strip of black (like around Frank's feet)? Harder still for an artist- when printed, relief prints appear in a mirror image than what's carved on the block/plate.

When you look at the print, you can see that all the inked parts are indented deeper into the paper (as would happen when the block/plate goes through a press), which is how you can tell that it's a relief print.

Intaglio prints (like etchings or engravings) are the opposite-- the etched/carved away lines from the block/plate are what becomes the inked lines. With intaglio, after the etching/engraving/drawing is done, the entire plate is inked, and then the surface is wiped clean. Therefore, the ink sits below the surface, held in the lines of the drawing. The drawing gets printed with the high pressure of a printing press.   

alright.that's.it.for.the.amateur.arttalk

Then, with Kat's and Sean's present....
It was wrapped.
After the wrapping was removed, there was a cardboard box.
After the cardboard box was opened, there was another box.


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Old-timey mildly dusty box... what can you possibly be?
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Antique (functional) typewriter!!!
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It's a Remington Rand #5 from the 1930s, and is still perfectly functional. My mom actually asked me why Kat and Sean would get me something that was "so old", haha.
"That was the pooooint, mum."
They got me extra tape too. I hope that I'll still be able to find typewriter tape for this thing 50 years from now.

I learned from the internet that:
"The most famous feature of the Remington 5 was its praiseworthy red self starter key, which is akin to today's "tab" function. Instead of counting out the spaces to indent paragraphs, one quick click on the self starter key would be equivalent to five spaces, while two clicks would give you an instant 10 spaces."
See red self starter key below.

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Apparently it was also hailed for being ultra-portable, weighing a mere 16 lbs.
I'll polish it up and dust it off and give it a real good cleaning soon. A part of me is feeling timid about using this thing because it feels so antique-y! And because there are sooo many buttons and levers and turny-things and I don't know what they all do, exactly.

So many levers and turny-things...


6 Comments
Rowena Li
11/10/2010 10:33:54 am

Happy Birthday! Love this blog.

Reply
kat
11/10/2010 11:29:52 am

yay! yay! yay! also the more i look at that Woodring print the more awesome I think it is - if that's possible. And thank you for the art history lesson haha

Reply
kat
11/10/2010 11:35:06 am

oh! and my mom also did not understand the typewriter. She was shocked to find that you liked it... lol And you should change the tape and type something with it! I wanna see what a printed page looks like from it!!!

Reply
Doris
11/11/2010 01:18:44 am

Thanks Prof. Li, and thanks Kat!

Colin had also been telling me to change the tape to type with the typewriter, because it seems like the current tape may be old (from the 30s? haha) and the type is coming out faint... But i'm so reluctant to change it because of how scarce this tape seems, haha.
::sigh::
I'll change it soon...

Reply
Maxine
11/11/2010 10:02:45 pm

I learned to type on a manual typewriter, you had to have tough pinky fingers, my gram let me use her typewriter for practice, similar to yours, and I typed out my mom's recipe cards. An whoa if you made a mistake... a gritty eraser with a brush a the end to hopefully get it all. fff jjj kkk ddd Happy belated B Day!

Reply
Doris
11/14/2010 12:26:03 pm

Great to hear from you, Maxine- hope all is well upstate!

You're totally right about needing muscular pinkies to use a typewriter though, that's for sure. The tape that's in the typewriter currently is still an old one, and you need to press down really hard for it to type-- pinky letters like ":a are tough!

Oooh, recipes. Perhaps I can use this typewriter to finally get an index card collection of typed recipes organized. Now I just need some recipes...

Reply



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    Doris

    Once in a while, I draw things.

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