August’s featured artist at the Edmonds Library, Roy Hughes, pursued a career in public education for 20 years, teaching many subjects including art. Later he obtained a master’s degree and then a doctorate in educational technology and communications, combining interests in art and technology and teaching multimedia and computer graphics courses at area community colleges.

Refresher courses in painting and his love of hiking led to painting scenes of the North Cascades and other landscapes in oil. From there he began creating such scenes on the computer in the form of digital block prints. He finds inspiration for his work in the Japanese wood block prints by Hiroshige and Hosukai, and travel posters by Maurice Logan and Norman Fraser from the 1920’s and 30’s.

Digital block prints look much like wood block and silk screen prints since they are made up of large, flat areas of bold color, creating the poster effect. A computer makes this process much more manageable. Using Adobe Photoshop graphics software, he begins with a reference photograph as an underlying layer, creating layers of color on top of the photo until he has created a layer for each color used in the image. It is a little like painting each color on a piece of glass and stacking them all together. Sometimes he will end up with nearly 200 layers in an image. The result is a completed piece of art which is flattened in the computer and printed out using a high quality inkjet printer.

His North Cascade digital block prints proved instrumental in earning his selection as artist-in-residence at Glacier National Park during July and Aug. of 2006 and leading to a series entitled “100 Views of Glacier National Park.”