How Bryan Nash Gill Makes His Amazing Prints from Cross-Sections of Fallen Trees

If you’ve been around the design and craft blogosphere in the last five years, you’ve probably seen Bryan Nash Gill’s “Woodcut” series, where the artist makes large-scale relief prints from crosscut sections of actual tree trunks and limbs.

Gill is about to release his first book of prints, which has been beautifully covered at Brain Pickings. (Go read it.) Maria Popova says,

Gills’ ink prints — sometimes stark, sometimes nuanced, always exquisitely beautiful — provide another, at once more abstract and more organic, way to visualize time, his labor-intensive printmaking process mirroring the patience imprinted on the trees’ arboreal rings. Looking at the cross-sections from above, inverting one’s usual orientation relative to a tree, kindles a kind of transcendental awe at these radial life records.

I wanted to know more about Gill’s technical process, so I searched for a video, and found this great short piece by Philip Leaman.

Go read that great piece at BrainPickings. Photos from DesignBoom via Doobybrain.