With skilled hands and a great attention to detail, artists Paul Roden and Valerie Lueth recently produced this gorgeous carving, entitled Moth. The Pittsburgh-based collaboration, known as Tugboat Printshop, specializes in all kinds of hand-crafted woodblocks that they use to produce gorgeous, mutli-colored ink prints on fine papers. The final products feature gradients of color moving across everything from intricate gardens and the surface of the moon to a creative map of the United States.
Like most of the wood carvings, Moth began as a pen drawing on a block of birch plywood. The artists then used small hand tools to chip away at the wood and create the low relief, meticulous patterns and texture across the winged creature. The final 2-color print is still in production and can be pre-ordered on the Tugboat Printshop website. The artists explain that they selected a moth because it is “A nocturnal creature, but a symbol of hope & newness, none-the-less. A soft and fluttering presence, a meticulous and complex emblem of the building blocks that shape our natural world.”
