A Small Explosion

Because of its characteristic layering of transparent colors, I've often thought that mokuhanga (watercolor woodblock printing) could lend itself to representing movement over time. Movement being an essential quality of fire, this series seemed like a good opportunity to test that idea. I decided to use video stills of fire to derive the shapes for each of these designs, and I hope to see some movement in the resulting images.

Archaeologists estimate that human beings started using fire, which they probably harvested from spontaneous grass fires or lightning strikes, a million years ago or so. Fire usually starts with some kind of explosion, as the heat that's applied reaches a high enough temperature for the fuel to ignite, so I begin the series with the lighting of a match — a small controlled explosion. I was surprised to learn that the first friction match was invented quite recently in the long history of humans using fire:  1826.

Here is block #1 and the print that resulted after two pale applications of color from this block.

All of these images will be 11 x 17 inches

A circular bokashi (fade) is really difficult to do consistently.