Often, I reuse, rework or review a piece until I am happy with it. Turtle doves are beautiful birds which pair for life. I created a woodcut Turtle Dove decoration for my friends Hannah and Calum - and I revisited this design again for another wedding present, this time for my colleague Nic and her new husband Kevin. You can see a close up of the arrangement of their names below. You need to ensure you have enough contact between the letters and the space they are filling, whilst maintaining the legibility of the letters. In this case, the space is heart shaped - by making their first letters larger and using the same diagonal angle for the K and the N, I created some interest on the left hand side. Of course, you cannot have the dot of the ‘i’ floating in mid air, so these have to be attached to the bottom part of the letter. The ampersand ‘&’ becomes a feature in itself, and connects Kevin and Nic together both figuratively and literally. It is like a jigsaw puzzle creating lettering which works to fill a space.
With the laser cutter, I have been experimenting with creating wood cuts - so I used a simple version of the dove design to see how this would work out as an inked print done on my printing press. You can see the results of the experiment below and the notes I scribbled - what I felt worked and what was unsuccessful. Although I loved the wood grain effect, it simply did not work as an image. There was an uneven balance between the black and the white - the heart was blank, and it was clear that the laser cut wedding gifts worked because it had the detail of the lettering to break up this blank space. The natural wood grain effect did not sit well with the more abstract tail - and the eyes and beaks where somewhat lost in the woodgrain. The black ink looked somewhat funereal.
I tried again with another version of the design as a printed woodcut. You can see that this is slightly more successful. This was done in plywood - so although you get some woodgrain effect, it does not obscure the detail of the doves or conflict with the abstract nature. The heart looks better broken up with the semi circle details, as does the tail. There is a better balance between the coloured areas and white space. However, I was still not happy with it. I did not feel it fully captured the sweet nature of turtle doves, and somehow they looked a bit clumsy. Shortly, I will do another post to describe how I was able to create a much more successful version as a printed rubber cut….
