Journal
An illustration for Dan Needles’ recent book FINDING LARKSPUR.
How give directions. An illustration for FINDING LARKSPUR by Dan Needles.
A look at my engraving process
At times I am asked to describe my process, so here are a few images and notes I hope will show you the steps that my wood engravings go through. In another journal entry I will show you the tools that I use to engrave the blocks.
1- The sketch - I make numerous sketches, the first few are rough while I look for gesture and composition. When I get the drawing to a state that feels ready I transfer the drawing to the block.
2 - This engraving was to be a two colour cover for the Wood Engravers Network calendar. This is final rough and how I decided the second colour would surround the key block
3 - Images transfered to block.
3 - 4 Drawing on the block. I am careful not to over do the drawing on the block. I just need the overall outline and enough details in the face, hands, and other charactors and objects in the image.
5 - Here you can see the area around the top of the figure where I have started to clear away the background. Clearing out like this is a kind of warm up
6 - The main image is cleared free and I have started on the face and hands of the Hurdy Gurdy player. I like to get on with the “hard parts” early in the process in case something doesn’t work out. Then I can start over without having lost to many hours or even days.
7 - More working on the main characters
8 - Here the block is completed and ready to be proofed. Proofing can take many trips back and forth from the engraving table and the press until it is finally completed.
9 - The final proof with some ruling set in to help with registration.
10 - The second colour block set in registar.
11 - The type set and arranged in place.
12 - Finally the printing is happening. These are proofs set out to dry. The printing is done in sequencel, black first, then the second colour is registered and the type is printed last.
13 - This is the final version. I changed to the yellow ink for the second colour and added a bit of blue to the key block to jazz up the colour reaction.
The Wood Engravers’ Network is an active promoter of wood engraving in North America. I am proud to be a member. Check out their website
www.woodengravers.org
New Book Release: Out of the Dark
New Book Release Teaser: Out of the Dark The exacting art of wood engraving is defined by presence and absence, shadow and light, black and white. An arduous yet rewarding art form, it requires an artistic eye and a dedication to technique in order to imbue each image with its own visual narrative.
Wood engraver Wesley W. Bates, the artist behind the acclaimed book The Point of the Graver, demonstrates the power and precision of the form in his new collection Out of the Dark.
Bates brings to bear decades of experience, deftly wielding his graver to coax vibrant and lifelike images from solid blocks of endgrain wood. In so doing, he frees each likeness not only from the blocks that hold them captive but also from the reaches of his prodigious imagination. With a wide variety of engravings in Bates’s unmistakable style, and accompanying texts to bring the reader into the artist’s studio, Out of the Dark is a treat for all who appreciate the traditional form.
Two Fellas Talking Shop
My friend Andrew and I are looking forward to a conversation thanks to the Alcuin Society's 2021 Virtual Lecture Series.
From the Alcuin Society:
Gaspereau Press’s Andrew Steeves and wood engraver Wesley Bates have been friends and collaborators for nearly a quarter century. Wesley’s mirthful, masterly illustrations have been used in Gaspereau Press books more often than the work of any other artist. This informal conversation will explore the work that Steeves and Bates have done together and discuss the nature of the collaborative process. This is an opportunity to listen in to two old friends talking about their craft and their shared passion for making books. This event is free and open to the public. Please register early, as space is limited, and great interest was shown in our first lecture. The event will be recorded and uploaded to the Alcuin Society YouTube channel in the weeks following the talk.”
Thursday, September 16, 8:00 P.M. EST on Zoom
This event is free and open to the public. Please register early, as space is limited, and great interest was shown in our first lectures. Two days prior to the Lecture, attendees will receive a Zoom link to access the event.
Twelve New Engravings for Home Waters by John N. Maclean
I am thrilled that my wood engraving Casting Into Myster was chosen for the Dundas Art Walk.
About the Book
Featuring twelve wood engravings by Wesley W. Bates and a map of the Blackfoot River region.
A "poetic" and "captivating" (Publishers Weekly) memoir about the power of place to shape generations, Home Waters is John N. Maclean's remarkable memoir of his family's century-long love affair with Montana's majestic Blackfoot River, the setting for his father's classic novella, A River Runs through It. Maclean returns annually to the simple family cabin that his grandfather built by hand, still in search of the trout of a lifetime. When he hooks it at last, decades of longing promise to be fulfilled, inspiring John, reporter and author, to finally write the story he was born to tell.
“BEAUTIFUL. ... Spectacularly vivid. ... A lyrical companion to his father’s classic, A River Runs through It, chronicling their family’s history and bond with Montana’s Blackfoot River.” —Washington Post
A New York Times "New & Noteworthy" Selection
A book that will resonate with everyone who feels deeply rooted to a landscape, Home Waters is chronicle of a family who claimed a river, from one generation to the next, of how this family came of age in the 20th century and later as they scattered across the country, faced tragedy and success, yet were always drawn back to the waters that bound them together. Here are the true stories behind the beloved characters fictionalized in A River Runs through It, including the Reverend Maclean, the patriarch who introduced the family to fishing; Norman, who balanced a life divided between literature and the tug of the rugged West; and tragic yet luminous Paul (played by Brad Pitt in Robert Redford’s film adaptation), whose mysterious death has haunted the family and led John to investigate his uncle’s murder and reveal new details in these pages.
A universal story about nature, family, and the art of fly fishing, Maclean’s memoir beautifully portrays the inextricable ways our personal histories are linked to the places we come from—our home waters.
Casting into Mystery Earns Silver Medal from 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards
Casting into Mystery has been acknowledged by the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards with a silver medal.
The angling memoir written by Robert Reid, with engravings by Wesley W. Bates, was published in 2020 by Porcupine’s Quill.
‘We are honoured to be recognized in a literary contest that spans the globe,’ Reid said. ‘It’s rewarding to receive recognition from people who are knowledgeable about and devoted to book publishing, especially during these challenging times.’
Founded in 1996, the Independent Publisher Book Awards is a broad-based, unaffiliated awards program open to the English-speaking independent publishing industry spanning the globe. The awards are intended to bring recognition to exemplary independent, university and self-published titles produced each year and reward those that exhibit the courage, innovation and creativity to bring about change in the world of publishing.
Every year since its inception, the IPPY awards have identified a reading list of progressive, thought-provoking books, the kind that can touch lives, advance careers and stretch imaginations. The awards are presented each spring by the publishing services firm of Jenkins Group of Traverse City, Michigan and www.IndependentPublisher.com
Casting into Mystery garnered silver in the ENVIRONMENT/ECOLOGY category. The winners include:
GOLD: Photographers Against Wildlife Crime, by Britta Jaschinski & Keith Wilson (Photographers Against Wildlife Crime)
SILVER: Casting into Mystery, by Robert Reid: engravings by Wesley W. Bates (The Porcupine’s Quill)
BRONZE: Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings, by Valerie Trouet (Johns Hopkins University Press)
Used with permission from PR FIRM NAME
Wood Engraving: A Short History
The oldest known means for reproducing a picture is relief printing. This process, developed over 2000 years ago in Asia, involves making a print from a surface which has been carved so that the images to be printed is raised or ‘in relief’. A common example of a relief printing surfaced today are the numbers on a bank card or a credit card which could be printed if the swiping or tapping modes on the machine failed.
Stone was likely used for the first relief prints, though by the 13th century woodcuts had been introduced into Europe and were gaining in popularity. By c.1450 when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type, woodcuts images had become important elements in the development of the book. Best known of the early woodcut artists in undoubtedly Albrecht Durer whose illustration of his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of 1498 represent the zenith of the art in its golden years in Northern Europe.
By the 18th century, however, the woodcut had been largely replaced by etching and engraving on metal, techniques that produce a broader range of effects making image reproduction and hence book production more sophisticated. Printing from the metal plates is an intaglio process, the opposite from relief printing. The image is cut into the printing surface using either acid (etching) or tools (engraving) and the ink is actually forced into the etched or engraved lines, not applied to a raised surface.
The use of etching and engraving for illustrations and movable type for the text caused problems for the publishing industry that were not so much artistic as economic. Since etching and engraving on metal are intaglio printmaking mediums and type is a relief medium, two distinct printing processes and two different printing presses were required to produce an illustrated book. As publishing costs rose in the mid 1700’s, artists and printers sought new ways to print books which combined text and illustrations.
It is generally agreed among scholars that it was Thomas Bewick (1753 - 1828), an established English metal engraver, who first arrived at the solution. Having a life-long passion for natural history, Bewick decided to publish an illustrated book on quadrupeds. Rather that printing the books in the conventional way which would have been prohibitive economically speaking, Bewick chose to use blocks of hardwood in place of metal for his engravings, using the hard end-grain, not the side-grain as a woodcut artist would do. He also gauged his blocks to the same height as the printing type so that the text and wood engraved illustrations could both be printed on the same press, a letterpress.
Bewick’s Natural History of Quadrupeds (1790) and his two volume History of British Birds (1797 and 1804) were so popular in their day that he was almost single-handedly responsible for establishing wood engravings the primary medium for book illustration over the next hundred years. Bewick’s leap of imagination was to adapt his metal engraving tools for use on the engrain surface and also to follow his natural instinct and allow the image to be revealed in the white lines created by the tools. His engravings were so appealing that artists such as William Blake and Edward Calvert tried their hand at wood engraving, elevating if further as an art form. But more importantly, with advances in printing and paper making during the Victorian era, wood engraving developed into a huge trade industry growing dramatically to meet the demands of publishing houses.
The skill for the average 19th century wood engraver became so highly developed that it seemed there was not limit to what could be engraved. But by the end of the century the trade engraver had become a mere technician reproducing images that an artist had drawn on the block. From there it was not long before the wood engraver was replaced by newly-developed photographic techniques which copied artists’ work faster and cheaper. These changes had a drastic effect on the trade of wood engraving and it was soon in a steep decline.
The fate of wood engraving, however, was not oblivion. In the late 1800’s the Arts and Crafts Movement lead by William Morris, Edward Burn-Jones and other artists who were disenchanted with the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization, promoted a revival of the traditional handcrafts, among them wood engraving, printing by hand, bookbinding and other book arts. The Private Press Movement, as this phenomenon was called, became the new haven for the art of wood engraving.
From the 1890’s to the 1940’s the Private Press Movement had a significant influence on the artistic side of the design and publishing world. Wood engraving blossomed again and many of the leading artists of the day worked in the medium including, Eric Gill, Paul Nash and Gertrude Hermes and a young Henry Moore.
Wood engraving is still a valid art medium today, often employed in book illustration, especially in high-end publishing. It is also used in the commercial design world as a specialty technique. The Society of Wood Engravers in England formed in the early 1900’s is still going strong today and the more recently established Wood Engraver’s Network is enjoying steady growth in North America. The future looks promising for the art of wood engraving.