Making the Mini Halfwood: Making a Legacy Halfwood Press

The Mini Halfwood Press was first shown publicly in a park. The designer, artist Bill Ritchie, brought the press along on a family picnic and set up his brand-new, first-ever miniature etching press and began making prints from plates he made on the spot. He drew a tree on a small, shiny copper plate using a sharp steel needle. People walking by on the pathway stopped and stared, and kids ventured up and asked what he was doing. "I'm a printmaker," Bill said, and they watched him pull the first proof. This book, "Making the Mini Halfwood," is his notes that he wrote when was making the press in his press-making workshop in Seattle. It started out to be a how-to book, but the process became so complicated that it was not published, after all. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of that day in June, 2014, it was decided to proceed despite that the reader may find that making the Mini Halfwood Press is not as easy at it may appear.

Author: Bill Ritchie
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 03/15/2014
Pages: 58
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 11.00h x 8.50w x 0.15d
ISBN13: 9781497359598
ISBN10: 1497359597
BISAC Categories:
- Crafts & Hobbies | Miniatures

About the Author
Bill Ritchie lives in Seattle with his wife, Lynda. Educated in state colleges in Washington State and California in the 1960s, he taught printmaking at the University of Washington from 1966 to 1985. A year after his last sabbatical Ritchie left the university in-venting a new printmaking teaching method for blended distance learning. Using video and computers, he has striven to restore the unique, personal aspects of art professors' offerings which he thought were being devalued and lost. His lifework became an "asset management and legacy transfer scheme," a game-like practice that he code-named "Emeralda: Games for the Gifts of Life." In 2004 Ritchie designed his first Halfwood Etching press with a 24-inch wide bed. A professional steel Wright, named Tom Kughler, produced a one-fourth scale model of it, and Ritchie named this one - the subject of this guidebook, the "Mini Halfwood Press." Ritchie teaches that printmaking is greater than the sum of handcraft and techniques or the manners of drawing and painting. His own printmaking has been a seamless blend of video, film, and computer graphics. "Everything in art is printmaking in one form or an-other," he tells his students. "When I opened my eyes to art, I was looking at a print." Creative writing, especially historic fiction, is another way to teach. Story-telling, video games and distance learning call for a balance of creativity and invention in which any experience-including printmaking, can be shared. Toward this end the books that Ritchie publishes are exercises that advance him in a teacher's role. His Website for the Half-wood Presses is www.printmakingworld.com and his personal, artist/teacher's Website is www.ritchie-art.com

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