Wood Rubbings

Inspired by the research I did on Bryan Nash Gill and Julian Meredith, I wanted to continue to use wood to create prints, I wanted to look particularly at how different pieces of wood would give me different grain prints.

I took a thin piece of wood which contained a knot in the middle, I burnt it using a blow torch and then I used a wire brush to help raise the grain. I then took a thin sheet of grease proof / tracing paper and decided I would use a hard and soft pencil to do some wood rubbings to see if the grain would show. The outcome was reasonably successful, the soft pencil rubbing was a little hit and miss as the pencil was too smudgy and you couldn’t see the grain properly, the harder pencil was much more effective at picking up the detail from the wood. This little study was my starting point, I then moved onto a much larger piece of wood which I had damaged intentionally to give me high and low points within the wood, I then took the harder pencil again and did another rubbing. Due to my earlier test, I felt comfortable that using the harder pencil would work well, the outcome was good however I didn’t like that I had to break the wood, I much preferred the more natural wood.