Groundhog Day 2022

 

woodcut printed in oil-based ink on Kraft cardstock

This year the good ol' groundhog can't even be bothered to come out. Shadow or not, he's staying in his hole. 

While hopefully viewers find some humor here, it is a dark humor. I wish this year's Groundhog Day card design could have been more positive. We're now into the third year of a global pandemic that is gradually shifting to endemic. Still scary, but we're also all just so damned fatigued. It's hard to get excited about anything anymore because so many plans have been cancelled. Most of us who have survived this thing are now a couple years older, poorer, and more melancholy than we were before it began. Work is far more constant than joy.

Who could blame the fuzzy little guy for his reluctance to emerge? 

This is my 8th annual Groundhog Day card. If you'd like to see the previous years' designs, here are the links.

Groundhog Day 2014 
Groundhog Day 2015 (I skipped 2016)
Groundhog Day 2017
Groundhog Day 2018 
Groundhog Day 2019
Groundhog Day 2020 
Groundhog Day 2021 

"Tiger Mandala" (Year of the Tiger 2022)

 

My Year of the Tiger print for a card exchange with Baren Forum. This is a hand-colored linocut printed on white Stonehenge. 

I've done a few hand-colored mandalas in the same style as this before. It's simply the same image rotated and repeated 4 times. The difference with this one is that this whole image is a single carved block. 

Originally I was going to do something simpler. I wanted to do a tiger chasing it's own tail. But the more I fiddled around with ideas, the more I just wanted to make another elaborate mandala. It's much more time consuming, especially when I color them, but so worth the final product. 

This is my 5th year participating in  New Year's Exchanges with the Baren Forum for Woodblock Printmaking. Here are my prints from previous years' trades: 

Year of the Ox, 2021 
Year of the Rat, 2020
Year of the Pig, 2019 
Year of the Dog. 2018