Thursday, October 4, 2012

Happiness is a full drying rack


There are few things that make me happier than this nice, full rack of drying linocuts. Okay. Maybe if it were a rack full of FINISHED prints I'd be happier, but this is good enough for today. Let's see how we got here, shall we?

Steps 1 and 2 were shown in the previous post, so let's start with Step 3:

Step 3
The second level of leaves has been carved, and a layer of transparent yellow ochre applied to the entire image.

Next, more leaves were carved and another blended ochre-to-green pass printed.

Steps 3 and 4 side-by-side
More leaves, but this time a darker green was applied only to the lower half of the image.

Steps 4 and 5 side-by-side
Whew! That was a lot of dinky little carving. Thank goodness this is just a 5-by-7-inch linocut, otherwise I'd still be carving and not making a blog post.

Enough with the leaves, it's time to get the background going. It's a solid, but transparent, tan color.  It has some nice variety and dimension because of the way it's interacting with the previous blended layers.

Step 6

I did say I wanted to keep this image to 5 or 6 color passes, but I think it needs one more dark to punch it all up. Perhaps some sort of top-to-bottom blend again. There's not a lot of carving to do, just some twigs and branches that I hope will read as part of the background. Stay tuned.

7 comments:

  1. Super cool, Sherrie! I'd be happy if all these were hanging in my studio after a few days of hard work :).

    Leaves make for such fabulous designs and patterns, don't they? Can't wait to see the finished print.

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  2. Hi Sherrie, I'm a printmaker in UK and have just found your blog (do take a look at mine). I enjoyed reading about and seeing your lovely leaves print, great colours!

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  3. Hi all! Welcome, Janis and Anna... thanks for taking the time to chime in and say hello.

    This piece has (of course) evolved in the last few days and still isn't done. Jill, Sonya and Jennifer will not be surprised. In fact, they're probably chortling in their soup right now. But thanks, as always, for the cheering section. You all keep me going...

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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...