The Dance Of Death

My skull fixation has led me to some very interesting and often gruesome source material over the last few months, but I have recently come back around to the grandaddy of printed skeletons; The Dance of Death, a set of woodcut prints by Hans Holbein in the sixteenth century.

This set of forty one woodcut illustrations (more were added in later publication and are of doubtful origin) depict Death in a much more predatory guise than more modern characterisations. We often consider Death to be a patient scavenger, biding time and picking up the opportune mishap here and there. In Holbein’s time (1497-1543) Death is an active participant in everyone’s lives, and the series portrays Death (as a skeleton) almost as a drunken uncle at a wedding, leering over the shoulder of all who pose for a picture.

The first print shows the familiar medieval interpretation of the creation, and appropriately lacks any signs of impending mortality:

In fact, Death does not appear as a skeleton until Adam and Eve’s expulsion on plate iii having metamorphosed from the serpent, but takes on a pretty major role from then on:

Death then visits everyone, from the Pope ‘downwards’ and reminds them, mocks them or actively leads them towards their ends.

Ok, enough of the potted history – there are some excellent resources on the interweb and I have included some  links at the end of this post – I am fascinated by these images not only for the skulls, but also for the craftsmanship. I have scanned these and enlarged them deliberately to allow for detailed viewing, but these woodblocks were delicately crafted at just over two and a half inches, that’s a tiny 65mm!

You can see the full set of images and get more factual information on a variety of websites, including

http://www.sacred-texts.com/jbh2yr/21790-h.htm#h2H_4_0007
 

http://www.library.illinois.edu/blog/digitizedbotw/2007/07/the_dance_of_death_1892_1.html
 

Wood block

I bought a piece of Japanese plywood with the aim of experimenting with woodcut printing. I only bought a smallish piece, just larger than A2 to practice with but have not done anything with it so far. It has a very smooth surface and is recommended as a starter block for beginners.  (Probably because it is cheap!)

Having got a little fatigued with designing the circus poster I wrote about recently, I decided to ’rest’ a little by doing a  little woodcutting. What started off as a little trial ended up being much more complicated as usual. A very wordy typographic piece actually. Why can’t I be fixated upon amoeba or something similarly simple instead of letterforms?

I have a whole file of quotes, quips, excerpts and bon mots, usually about design, typography, creativity and the like, and after an initial rummage I came across a wonderful statement by Beatrice Warde, an American typographer and academic originally typeset and printed in 1932 as a stand against the new modernist typographical styles and in defence of the power of printing. I immediately decided to use a non-classical font, something a bit more playful and unrestrained. The original was set in Eric Gill’s splendid Perpetua and is a fine example of what was considered as classical, civilised, refined and legible at the time. I even considered Comic Sans for a while, but decided that I couldn’t face it!

After a dig around some old font discs I came upon some 1960′s inspired stuff with all kinds of swashed pairs included. It seemed relatively simple too – no fine serifs and plenty of variations in line width etc.

A little while in Illustrator to get everything just right…

Followed by a trace using carbon paper…

Leaving a reversed line version on the wood.

The entire piece was cut using 10A scalpels. I used almost 5 packs in total!

Each letter was traced and the inner parts were removed by ‘digging’ out with either the scalpel or an awl.

After the first couple of lines I realised that I’d given myself a larger task than I’d originally planned!

This is the point where I had one more letter to cut. The jar contains all my used blades…

And here is the finished block. Well, I say finished, but there are a few little nicks that need filling before I go to print. Also, I’ve just noticed that I missed the leg of the R at the beginning (right hand side) of the third line down. I’ll do that too.

And finally, a shot of the block with a penny to show scale. Printing tomorrow!