Turn a photo-collage into a woodcut print

The original plan for this picture was to create a collage portrait of Jan Sung, the owner of Eliza’s Restaurant in San Francisco, a great place for delicious Hunan and Mandarin cuisine. Using a digital camera, a series of photographs of the owner and of scenes from the interior and exterior of the restaurant were captured. Our expert, Jeremy Sutton, was drawn to the restaurant’s mix of ancient Chinese artifacts with its modern, bright, dramatic, Matisse-like backlit wall panels and unusual fluorescent ceiling sculptures.

The woodcut stage of this portrait was initially intended as an intermediate variation from which to clone some varied textures and colours. Jeremy was surprised that the stark, harsh, flat, graphic woodcut, with its limited range of colours and its heavy black linework, was so much more powerful and beautiful than the garish, complex, intricate, multi-coloured, multi-layered photo-collage he eventually created. He explains: “I kept returning to the beauty of the woodcut stage until the light bulb finally went off in my head: that the woodcut was it!”

Follow Jeremy’s steps to this realisation over the next six pages…