Pizza from Scratch – Part 2

January 2016: Return to Pizza . . . a year later . . . the wheat has been harvested, a new pizza oven built and pizzas cooked, so the time has come to make the book. Working with colored markers I make storyboards of three-inch-square thumbnail sketches charting the progression of events.

Weeds, burning, charred remains, and cultivating

Since I began with the notion of clearing a field of weeds, and weeds are the subject of the woodcuts already completed (see Pizza – a work in progress) this will be my starting point. In these thumbnails  I envision a portrait-format book, with tall narrow pages, that opens to form a square – a useful frame for pizza.

Sowing seed, seedlings, scarecrow, harrowing

The organic Glenn spring wheat came from Johnny's Select Seeds in Maine.  Next, I chart the cultivation of heirloom Amish Paste tomatoes. The tomato seeds were planted before the wheat, so if the book is to progress chronologically these images should be first.

How to build the adobe clay wood-fired pizza oven will be explained with scale drawings and illustrations of key stages starting with gathering of all the necessary materials. This is the second pizza oven I have built, the first is documented in a post on September 2011: 'Recycling the East Side School – in a wood-fired clay pizza oven' and again on May 2012: 'Disaster – Wood-fired oven burns down'. Consequently it's construction will be considerably more robust!

Loading Iowa sand into the Dodge Ram 1500

Finished oven, blueprints, digging clay, puddling clay

The oven is formed, brick by brick, around a dome of sand covered in dampened newspaper.

Now the ideas are coming together, it is time to make more detailed drawings and studies for the prints. Follow the progress in Pizza from Scratch – Part 3