Monday, March 7, 2011

Slow progress

Well, March has certainly come in like a wild beast... a lot of thrashing about and general chaos. Progress on the linocut-formerly-known-as-a-yellow-rectangle has been slow... I seem to be easily overwhelmed right now.

Pushing forward is the key, regardless of discomfort, so here we are. This piece is a shot in the reduction printing dark for me, as two colors from now I want an ink layer to read as blue, not green. Logic says it's not possible... and I am prepared (at least a little) for utter failure. The best way out is through, ya know? It's a challenge I need to solve for future pieces-to-be, so I have to start somewhere. It's too complex an image for me to feel at all comfortable with the idea of separate blocks.


Speaking of wild beasts and slow progress... 25 minutes up the pass from here it looks like this today:

CDOT road cam. Yes, there's a road there somewhere. And a drop off the mountainside.

Although down here in the valley we've still had naught but damp flakes. I'd really like to wake up to a nice, wet blanket of snow tomorrow... followed immediately by blue skies and warm temps so my sketching workshop at the Monte Vista Crane Festival can go outside on Saturday!

5 comments:

  1. Aghh! The "I want blue, not green!" dilemma.
    How you manage this will have me gnawing my nails til the next post...

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  2. I have no idea how you'd go about getting blue. Please let us know how it turns out.

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  3. Would a double layer of blue work? The first one would come out green, but the next one would overlie that, so would be blue-er. Or am I revealing an ignorance so appalling that it makes appalling itself do a facepalm?

    My excuse is that I am gobsmacked by the snow.

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  4. Have you tried letting the yellow dry completely and printing the blue without transparent base? Since the ink doesn't absorb into the yellow, you should get a good blue. Printing like this could result in a shiny blue area.To remedy this,lay a piece of newsprint over the wet print and rub to transfer some of the blue to the newsprint. This works pretty well for me.

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  5. I actually do have a "plan" similar to Snail's suggestion. (See? Snow is good for you.) The next layer is a greeny-yellow, so a transparent blue most likely. The next layer is a bright blue (hopefully), so I'll be using lots of white in it, which is more opaque. No transparent base a'tall. If that doesn't work, I'll print over the same thing again.

    Longtime readers will remember The Drama of the "Mustard" Stain. ;-)
    http://brushandbaren.blogspot.com/2009/09/now-where-were-we.html

    I did learn something from it.

    ReplyDelete

Linocut in Progress: The Third Act

Time to wrap up this linocut ! And we are wrapping at warp speed (see what I did there?)... because there are deadlines. Exhibition deadline...