blue noodles in texas

Blue Noodles, Japanese woodblock print, Kylie Budge

I was really very touched when food magazine, Edible Austin (as in Austin, Texas) approached me about using one of my woodblock prints featuring Japanese food to illustrate a story about this same topic. So Blue Noodles sits proudly alongside this great story about Japan's gift to good food in the world. You can see the web version here. Hard copies are available from Edible Austin. They've included some fab resources and recipes.

Blue Noodles was created about 8 years ago while living in Kyoto, Japan. I was surrounded by incredible food all day long and it seeped into my creative consciousness, and then leaked out into my printmaking. At that time I was very fond of eating enoki mushrooms and renkon (lotus root) and so if you look carefully you'll see them swimming around in this print. You can buy fresh renkon in some Asian grocery shops in big cities in Australia. It's highly nutritious (why don't we eat more of it in the West?) and really nice lightly fried with a touch of soy sauce or chilli powder (zing!). Add it to stir fries for a bit of pazazz.

Here are some links to a couple of Japanese cooking blogs if you feel inspired to learn more:

justhungry
justbento

In terms of other Japanese favourites I'm a bit of a closet fan of okinomiyaki. Each region has their own way of making this dish but I do love the Kyoto version. A friend from Hiroshima once made me their local style (with noodles). Interesting! Do you have any favourite Japanese food/s?

lines & shapes

Some lines and shapes from the past few days.

1. the Convent Gallery roof, Daylesford, Victoria.
2. lichen, Daylesford, Victoria.
3. networks, woodblock print

woodblock print set

Living things, from the desert: the finished set. Woodblock print made using the traditional Japanese method, that is, watercolour inks (no toxic chemicals), hand pressed with a baren, and printed on lovely textured Japanese paper.

pinks amongst the living

I've been printing. My hands, especially my knuckles get sore when I do too much. It comes from placing to much pressure on that part of my hand when I use the baren. Last time I printed my knuckles actually bled and where painful for more than a week after :(
I'm experimenting with dusky pinks amongst the pale grey of 'living things' which is what these watercolour washes are about.
I love how the wood, as it ages with use, gets really smooth. Like an old river pebble or driftwood at the beach. So tactile and lovely.

aria komianou

Inspiration and gorgeous design is a wondeful thing. Aria Komianou's woodblock print above just does it for me today. Her print received an honorable mention prize in KIWA 2007. I love the red and black together and the blocks of abstraction balanced by the fragile details in the middle of the print.

sento love

Yesterday's article in the The Age about an Australian using a Japanese sento for the first time made me quite homesick for my other home, Kyoto. And then I found all these cool sento images on ii ne kore and they made me sink deeper into my 'natsukashi' moment. You see, I love the sento/onsen experience so much I made 3 woodblock prints about them when I was living in Kyoto (see pics above): Sento 1, 2 & 3.

For the 7 years I lived there I didn't have a bathroom in my tiny apartment and so I used the local sento every night (I was lucky to have 3 in my neighbourhood which I nicknamed: clean but mean; dirty but friendly; and just heavenly but a little too far to go). So you see, the sento and me, well, we became quite intimate. I even made friends at the sento. One Japanese woman who I'd made idle chit chat with in the bath over the years thought, up until the evening before I left the country for good, that I was French (we only spoke in Japanese). When I told her I was going to Australia she looked surprised and asked me why. When I told her it was where I was from she was really very shocked. All those years she thought I was a French woman! I wonder what that says about my Japanese pronunciation?

slow progress

I did hint it would take weeks of carving. The pic above is a print off one of the 5 blocks that I need to carve more from before it goes into the 5 colour print I'm making for the commission. I just wanted to print this little B&W number off it before I reduce it further. And that's my hanko (Japanese name stamp) purse you see on the left. I love that little thing!

We've had to cancel a trip to the Prom (aka Wilson's Prom) due to all the crazy fire activity still plaguing Victoria. And we were going to be hanging out with some lovely folk from the UK and be near the ocean and everything! We cancelled because we're being super careful and didn't want to risk being smoked in or the possibility of being stuck there due to fires all along the highway. They're predicting more craziness tomorrow with a forecast of 38 degrees and wind.

still life blue, the transformation

I'm trying to convert my 'still life blue' design (3rd image below) into a Japanese style woodblock print for a commission. I spent all yesterday afternoon working at this table sketching it out (it will be bigger this time) and putting the design onto blocks.

It's a lot of fun sketching out the design onto the wood but because this one will have 5 colours it needs 5 different blocks and super careful registration to make sure it all lines up when I print. The bonus is I recently ordered some moku hanga style shina plywood from Japan (thanks to baren forum and an old contact I had from my Japan days in Tokyo - Woodlike Matsumura) and it arrived a little while ago so I have plenty to work with. No more scrimping and placing designs on the unused ends of old blocks.

And the end result will look something like my giclee print (above) but because it will be a woodblock print it will have a very different character. Anyone like to guess just how many weeks 5 blocks will take me to carve? I like to take things at a leisurely pace.

PS. my giclee print is available to buy in the OZ Bushfire Appeal etsy shop. All funds raised go to the Australian Red Cross to help the 7000 people who were displaced by the fires last week.

fragments

I really like fragmented artwork, especially prints. And when they're framed well they can look amazing. I've had my 'living things' set (I have 2 different ones actually) for a while but this one above is new. I sold one like it recently so have made another, but each one I make is unique in the design or combination of pieces in the set. Nature is both strong and brittle, whole and fragmented and that's what I was trying to capture with this Japanese style woodblock print. This kind of print looks best when float mounted during framing. This means the pieces are lifted off the back of the matt so they appear to float in the frame. And for this particular print, float mounting emphasizes the fragility of the subject matter in a really nice way.

pale

For Illustration Friday: pale and fragile, the wings of a dragonfly. Japanese woodblock print on paper.

the way of tea

I was inspired by the beauty of an art shop in Smith St, Collingwood called St Luke's to create this little piece. It's a collage of original woodblock prints mounted on wooden art board with a lovely textured black backing. My photos keep making the black background look blue-ish but it's not, believe me. It's definitely a nice solid black. The woodblock prints have been printed on an olive coloured textured Japanese paper. But then again you can't really tell that from my photos here. Hmmmmm, it seems I'm being a bit challenged with light and photography at the moment......

A big happy birthday to all fellow Sagittarians in the world! I've just discovered a friend's birthday falls on xmas day. Poor N. He says he's used to it as he's had it his whole life (ha ha). No wonder he has a black xmas tree!

I'm not a very cheery Christmassy type of soul I'm afraid. No blog posts here about Christmas baking or homemade decorations (although I applaud all of you who can be bothered). Instead I usually spend this time to be a bit more reflective about the year that's passed and my hopes for the world in the year to come. I'm finding it a bit hard to do this year (the hope bit) as I'm surrounded by seriously ill friends and family and have been feeling a bit bleak lately. A good friend recommended reading Debra Adelaide's The Household Guide to Dying (which, despite the sound of its title is fiction) and so I bought a copy yesterday. And yet the birth/death cycle continues - I know 3 women who are due to have their babies this week. Good luck girls!!!!

slow days

Some days I feel like these snails: slow, slow, slow. But that's a good thing in my book because sometimes the pace of life is just too speedy for my liking. Slow walks down at the creek, sipping cups of tea slowly in the sun, slow afternoons of reading books and having naps, and best of all, slow food.

Unfortunately it's not really possible to print slowly. Well, not with the moku hanga method anyway. Too slow means inks and wood that dry up and does not bode well for the end result. The Japanese say that it's best to print on a humid, rainy day to keep the process moist. Our desert-like climate in Melbourne means that rainy days are scarce and the air is dry, dry, dry. So I had to print these new wee cards with a speed bordering on mania this morning.

sun kissed

We're been having some sublime spring sunshine lately. It makes for good long walks. I was down at St Kilda a few days ago and couldn't stop looking at the weathered texture in the old wood on the pier. It's a lovely spot too to look over the bay. I only get over to that side of Melbourne about once a year if that even though it's not that far away. Funny how we all tend to stick to our own neighbourhoods and 'tribes'.

I'm a bit addicted to shades of orange at the moment so you'll probably see that popping up more and more in my prints. This one is a new woodblock print greeting card in a firey red-orange and I've called it 'sun kissed'.

a morning spent printing

A few sweet friends have just ordered my Dragonfly set of woodblock prints so I've spent the morning printing those as I only ever have one or two sets on hand to support my listing in the shop. 

Try not notice that the sheet underneath (a photo prop) was not ironed :) Each set has 8 pieces in total and is made slightly differently from each other so offers a unique point for the owner. I've noticed something interesting about framing this set lately. Mine is framed with a light coloured timber frame and I always thought that was the best colour for this piece as it sets off nicely the browns in the ink and creams in the some of the paper. But then recently another friend bought this set from me and chose a burgandy coloured timber frame and to my surprise, it looks great. It just goes to show you can't get too set in your way about what will look good when it comes to framing. I usually advise people to use the float mount technique for framing this set as it lifts the pieces away from the mount board and adds a very slight shadow or 3D affect to the work. 

georgia thorpe

It's always very exciting to find the work of printmakers who I've never known about. It's even more exciting when I find that they're living right here in Melbourne. I came across Georgia Thorpe's work when reading the latest edition of Imprint (Journal of the Print Council of Australia). The image here is one of her prints: Rising Purple. I just love the colours and the floating quality in the work. It's a woodcut monotype. You just have to click on this link to see more in her gallery. She tells me she will be exhibiting some of her work in Melbourne this September. Without a doubt I'll be going along to see her prints in person.

little orange birdcages

I'm working on a bigger woodblock print using birdcages and the little blue fella you can see here. This morning I decided to make some cards with some of the partially cut blocks. I have a funny relationship with the colour orange. Some days I love it for its cheeriness and other days I think it's frightful.

shades of still life

It can sometimes be tricky to get the right colour and ink intensity in a print. I've played around with this print quite a bit over the last few days. A few posts ago I said I wanted it to have soft, gentle colours but now I'm not sure. The pale ones were ok but now I think I prefer the more intense blue colour in the later print run. I still like the composition and use of shadow in the print, but I think I might keep playing with the background colour a bit more before I let it just rest for a while. It's amazing how your attitude towards a print can change if you just walk away from it for a few weeks.