This was one of my early experiments. I wanted to play with wood block printing as described by Cennini. Well, sort of…Cennini talks about block printing on fabric, not on paper. But that wasn’t enough to stop me. 

Without much research, I chose a design roughly based on a manuscript illumination, the details of which I have forgotten. The block was carved in wood, partially with hand tools, partially with my handy not-so-period Dremel tool. Though I made a marginal attempt to make the ink with vine black pigment and acrylic varnish, it wasn’t working for me. So, I made a batch of prints with modern block printing ink on some random mediocre paper. 

It was fun, but clearly, I will need to revisit Cennini’s block printing lesson.