Building the Seventh Sin, Part I

This is what happens when you bury your nose into Dante’s Inferno. After reading that portion of the Divine Comedy, I couldn’t get the imagery out of my brain. I was sitting in my studio playing around with a simple quarter moon design which eventually led to seven designs based on the seven deadly sins. I ended up using these designs for both linoleum and wood cuts.

Lino and Wood Cut for Lust

Seven sins, seven prints. Matching text with the print designs took a little longer. I wanted text that allowed for a lot of white space around the words as well as space between the prints and the text. Once this was done I had the beginnings of an artist book in my brain.

Setting type for the Seventh Sin artist book

A print maker friend of mine, Jim Horton, asked if I wanted to participate in the Print Arts Studio (PAS), at Duderstadt Center on the campus of the University of Michigan. The PAS looked to be an ideal place to begin construction of the Seventh Sin artist book. With a full bodied type setting and printing operation, it was a no brainer to type set the words and print both the linoleum cuts and type at the PAS (the linoleum cuts showed more detail than the wood cuts).

This is where it began to get complicated. I could have settled for a single set of prints, but no… being the total print nerd that I am, I printed several of each image on two types of Reeves BFK, cream and white. This gave me enough prints to allowed me to produce two books at the PAS. One in white and one in cream.

But being a calligrapher, I was also interested in hand lettering one of the books and of course since I had two sets of prints (one in white and one in cream) I ended up lettering two books. I now was up to four books that eventually had to be assembled. This was getting out of hand.

Eventually, the pages for the four books were completed and I had to decide how to put them together. But before I could get to that, my daughter suggested that I should use the wood cuts and print the seven prints over each other. OK, that was brilliant!

Seven sins wood cuts on watercolor paper

The only problem was that I now had five books to assemble… oh my.