Gratuitous bid to distract readers from the other piece in progress

The second-to-last color went down on the epic eucalyptus-leaves-and-other-washed-up-stuff linocut today, but I think I'm going to save the reveal until the piece is completely resolved. It looks pretty funky at the moment.

In the meantime, here's another print I've been working on. It's just 5 x 7 inches (the "currently funky" piece is 9 x 12) and I'm printing it on Rives lightweight... not the problematic Hosho.

The first three passes were pretty uninteresting, so you didn't see them individually. The VERY first pass was white... which might seem odd. But the Rives lightweight is a creamy color and the image called for a section that was pretty darn white, so I cut a mask and printed a small area. I also masked the green shape, since it was limited to just this rectangular area of the image. Over both went a transparent blue. You can barely see any of it here.

Color passes 1, 2, and 3

Next, a transparent ochre-to-gray blend.

Pass #4 is a blended roll

And then a transparent purple-blue.

Pass # 5

What? You don't think it was purple? Here's the color scraped into a sheet of wax paper, next to the same color inked up on the block. I did say it was transparent.

I was feeling really good about things so far... nice, quiet, harmonious colors. That all went a little wacky with the next selected inking.

Pass # 6

It seems a bit harsh, but most of this blue will be covered up by other colors.

After the agony of the larger piece, I am really enjoying this one. Inks are doing what I want them to do, the paper isn't throwing fluff everywhere, I'm able to do all the printing with my baren and not having to resort to rubbing extra hard with the spoon. There are six passes here already and I'm cruising right along.

Of course, I haven't really given ANY thought to what's going to happen in the background of this piece. I think that's next. Or maybe the box and then the background and then the bird. Dunno. At least four more passes either way.