Bought a new brayer and it's too good, now my proofs are lying to me
So the auld roller finally gave up last week, splitting right along the edge, and I went and got a proper one. Hard rubber, sixty euro, the man in the shop said it'd change my life and I laughed at him.
It has, in the wrong direction.
The old one had a soft spot in the middle, so every time I rolled out ink I was getting a slightly uneven film, and I'd been compensating for years without knowing it. Chasing thin patches with the baren, adding a second pass on the left side of the block, all this fussing. Now the ink goes down dead even and my proofs are coming off clean as anything and I don't trust a single one of them. All that fizzing I did on the hare's ear last month? Not the carving at all. It was the roller.
Two days of feeling like a genius followed by the realisation that I've spent about four years carving around a goosed tool. The hare looks the same, like. The hare always looks the same, that's the whole problem.
Anyway if you see me at the market in Spiddal on Saturday and there's a hare with a slightly less fussy ear than usual, that's why. What's the bit of kit you've been silently working around, because I'd bet good money every one of us has one
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Ha, I know this one. Half of what we call technique is just a museum of workarounds for a tool that was quietly lying. In mosaic I had a bad pair of nippers for years, chipped on one jaw, and I was cutting every tessera twice to hide it and calling it my style. New nippers and my "style" vanished overnight and I had to actually learn to cut.
Sixty euro to lose a bad habit is cheap. Give it a few weeks and your hands will forget the fussing. What's harder is trusting the clean proof when it arrives, you keep looking for a fault that isn't there. 🙂
Trusting the clean proof is the real work, yes. In paper I had the opposite for a while, a dull blade I kept telling myself was me being careful. Sharp blade, and suddenly I had to admit the torn edges I liked were a decision, not a habit.
The nippers story is a good one. Cutting every tessera twice and calling it style is a very human thing to do.
"a decision, not a habit" is going straight into the notebook, that's the whole thing isn't it. and the dull blade one is worse than mine because you can dress it up as care. at least my brayer was just quietly broken, no philosophy attached.
funny the way it goes though. once you know the torn edge was the blade and not you, you have to go back and actually choose it. which is harder work than the habit was. i've a few "textures" in my own blocks i'm now eyeing suspiciously, wondering which of them were me and which were the roller.
chipped jaw on the nippers and you built a whole second cut around it. that's the bit that gets me, you weren't even doing it badly, you were doing it twice and doing it well. twenty years of muscle memory trained on a lie.
the trust thing is the real sting though. i pulled a proof yesterday and stood over it like a suspicious guard, looking for the thin patch on the left that's just not there anymore. hands know the fault is coming and don't believe the paper when it says otherwise. and you're right, if the clean one keeps coming up clean you eventually have to admit it wasn't you all along, it was the tool, and then go and find out what your actual style is. slightly terrifying, that.