Introducing: Arches National Park
The wait is over—Cypress' first National Parks print has dropped!
Spring is here. The studio has natural light until 8pm. We’re thinking about making our side business the real business.
If you’ve been keeping up, you’ve seen every layer of this print develop over the last couple of months. I couldn’t be more excited to finally finish it. Not only do I get to share Arches with you, but the backlog of National Parks prints finally feels touchable. So let’s get into, eh?
Arches
This print has been a labor of love. Throughout this winter, it’s been the grounding piece of Cypress that brought me back into the studio, reminded me that art can be a little less-than-perfect, and pushed me to commit to bigger and bolder projects.
A whole series of these should be coming out throughout the year. The backlog of top prints for friends is in progress. And I finally lined up a printer for Cypress Magazine. This print made me start Cypress’ 2025.
You can see here where I’m going to carve away the last bit of detail. This final pull is going to be a much darker brown* that lets the orange layer through as a base for the arches and acts as a grounding shadow. In other words, this is the layer that I laid down and thought “oh thank god this does look like a rock formation.”
*and hey, did you realize brown doesn't exist? It’s just orange, but with less light. And we’re not dealing with a ‘well um actually that’s two wavelengths of light mixing together’ type of situation. We just like… barely perceive brown as its own hue. Humans just kind of made it up: “in physics, brown is actually an orange colour with low lightness. The appearance of brown is viewed in relation to other colour stimuli, and it is therefore a related colour. This means that brown does not exist as a colour per se.”
Insane.
This is a reduction print, and this block is getting REDUCED. Like we’re down to very thin layers of linoleum at this point as I try to keep the ridges of negative space free of the ink that I’m rolling on. But key reminder here: this means that we’re on the last attempt at this print coming out at all. Once these layers get carved away, we can never go back.
This ink is drying slooooooow.
As the layers of this oil based ink are building up, they’re becoming tackier and tackier. By layer 3, I’m fighting a layer that won’t adhere to a layer that’s just barely dried.
There will only ever be 30 of these original prints. Even if I were to receive the blocks one day, the little inconsistencies and misregistrations that make each one of these unique won’t be recaptured. A process that was developed to mass produce turned into a one-off art form… these are the pieces that make block printing feel special.
Get ‘em while they’re wet
I’m not actually joking on this one. If you would like to purchase one, please give me about two weeks to ship them out. Otherwise, the last dark orange layer is going to stick to the packaging 🙃
Thanks for watching this whole print play out. I hope the behind the scenes is as fun to read as it is to write.
And like I said, there’s a series on the way. So if you have a favorite National Park or want to see a specific park printed, reply or comment here and let me know! Until next time 🏔️