aretalogue: Jim Lee (not the comic book artist) is a printmaker…
Jim Lee (not the comic book artist) is a printmaker and book artist who specializes in a technique called “reduction printing.” Reduction prints are a type of color woodcut that use only one piece of wood–after you stamp one color, you cut pieces away from your stamp, creating a new matrix out of your old one.
There are two things I love about this technique. First, when you finish a color and move to the next one, that’s it. You can’t fix any mistakes and you can’t create a second run of your print, because the thing that made your previous layers no longer exists. You’re burning your bridges behind you. Second, there is no way to really know what your finished piece is going to look like, because finishing requires creating and destroying a bunch of pieces that don’t exist yet. Yes, that’s kind of true for all art: you never know what you’re going to end up with. But there’s something different about the way you have to do this in a very particular order, and the way that you must destroy your tools to finish the work.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/182245831061.
