2x2: 2 Artists, 2 Sketchbooks -- Week 34

When I first received the sketchbook from Dana and paged through it, this week's page was one of my very favorites. It's probably easy to see why: watercolor pink roses.

Pink roses are my favorite flowers (if these are peonies, please forgive me Dana for mis-identifying your flowers, but loving roses makes me predisposed to see them as such!) and watercolors always make me happy.

I knew I would need to do something special for this week.

I decided to do a linocut for my page. Which might be kind of a silly choice because, hello, I'm a watercolor painter (and remember that thing about watercolors making me happy?!?).

Dana (l), Anne (r)

But once I started thinking about doing a linocut, I didn't want to do anything else. (And I'm glad that I got started working on it early because it did take a while).

The complicated thing about the page is that it is too big for me to do just one block with the size of blocks I had on hand so I ended up carving it in pieces.

my carved blocks

It was tricky for me to get everything lined up correctly when I printed the page because each block needed to be printed at a slightly different angle and the blocks would need to overlap a bit for proper placement. I probably could have done some complicated figuring to get things just right, but in the end I decided just to wing it (and amazingly, it worked out, except for some slight imperfections in the laying of the ink).

Dana (l), Anne (r)

Even so, this spread brings me so much joy.


Don't forget to check out Dana's blog for her take on this week's pages!


About the project:

2x2: 2 Artists, 2 Sketchbooks is a collaboration between artists Dana Barbieri and Anne Butera. Dana and Anne met in an online painting class. Although they have never met in person, they have become friends through regular visits to each others' blogs. It was through this connection that this project began. Wanting to move from friendship to collaboration, each spent two months filling one half of a sketchbook before mailing it off to the other. Dana worked on the lefthand pages and Anne on the right. Each will be responding to the other's work on the adjacent sketchbook pages over the coming year. Watch weekly as they reveal another page of their story.

About the artists:

Dana is an artist and crafter living in the foothills of the Catskill mountains two hours north of New York City with her husband, two children and little kitty. She is passionate about painting, knitting, crochet, color, pattern and design.

Anne is an artist, writer and crafter who finds inspiration and joy in the beauty of her garden and the magic of nature. Dissatisfied with and disheartened by the pace and lifestyle of the city, she and her husband (with their two rescued greyhounds and an aging Siamese) relocated to a small town in the beautiful Driftless region in southwest Wisconsin with the goal of living a slower, simpler, more intentional life.