This was part of the original shina plywood carving. For various reasons mentioned in this latest post, I had to restart, using MDF as the new base material.

Sometime in the future, I will be retouching the shina carving to sell as an original, since it won't be used for printing.

Printing Progress

Packages estimated to ship September/TBD

*Updated 8/31; Subject to change

Production is ongoing. I haven't block printed anything in months, so I decided to switch things up and start small with the freebies first.

As for the shirts, the most insane thing happened since this all started: I had to redo the block. Even more insane is that this ended up being the best decision I made for this project.

The shina plywood I used for the original (left of this post) yielded decent results at first. However, as printing when on, the image quality gradually degraded. I'm not sure if it had to do with the sealant, ink, or softness of the wood not agreeing with the high pressure of the etching press, but it was like a 1080p image reduced to 240p. I've never had this happen with a block, and I didn't have any solutions on how to problem solve around this. So despite months of buzzing anxiety lost on trying to make this work, I didn't give myself a moment to sulk; I just moved forward without a second thought.

The only other material I had available was MDF.
Can you guess how long it took to re-carve?

Two weeks.

On one hand...really? On the other, I'll take whatever win I can. Maybe this comes across as typical perfectionism, but if anything, that manifested as my stubbornness in trying to make a suboptimal material work for way too long. Making this call felt like the opposite.

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As for the more important details, I'm sending customers an email that the first orders to dispatch will be the "Stone God" tees, "Blood God", then those with combined purchases.

That is, if things for once go as planned for once. But given this latest development, I'm less worried about that.



Update 8/3
In these last 2 years, the time I spent in between work sessions involved contemplating what my next steps would be after completion. I never imagined there would be this many delays, and candidly, some of that was caused by necessary lifestyle changes - but also, my inability to adapt to them. "Blood/Stone God" was certainly a casualty of that, but I want it to be the last of its kind (in other words "do better"). For that reason and many others, I believe the end of this project will mark the end of this era of my business as I transition into a new one. I am going to retire block printed shirts, and this will likely be the last design I create.

Arriving at this conclusion gives this project more meaning for me as an artist, but it also gave way to self-induced pressure and the urge to constantly rework sections. I'm curbing that as I bring this to a close. I have to remind myself that it's just a shirt. But it's your shirt - one that you bought a long time ago.

I value my customers. I value all the people I've interacted with in the process, and I want to send you something of quality that shows it.

But it's also a shirt. So, time to work.