Spring Sprint was created after doing some light research on the origins of racing, spurred initially by my admiration of Thomas Bewick’s advertising cuts of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Bewick was a master of miniature vignettes in wood and metal engraving. I love the classic look of them and then started to look at hunting traditions which were most often aided by horses and dogs.
Cutting the block is very physical and obviously there is a huge amount of wood chips created from a block this big!
These prints take a lot of work and planning and sometimes I don’t get things right the first time, which is easy to forget when I’m only posting the finished pieces and not every step of the process. As I was cutting the 18 x 24 inch woodblock, I realized I should have included a prey animal to allude to the hunting tradition. So, I decided that I would add a little rabbit as part of the screen printed colors.
3 of the 5 screen printed colors complete – the 6th color comes from the woodblock.
