Thursday, January 24, 2013

Long linocut: Bird bits

Time to get some action going on our little coot buddy. It's almost become habit to pull out a sheet of mylar or acetate and cut a stencil for inking things like this, although remembering to take a photo of said stencil is less of a habit.


A light grey, lightly applied since most of it will be covered by the next color. A bit more carving and then a second grey was inked through the same stencil and printed. (Annoying shadows in all of these shots, sorry. I tried to avoid them, really I did.)


The next step is to pause and figure out the next step. One, maybe two more darks to go in the bird, but I don't want to print those using the stencil. Inking through a stencil works really well, but the edges of shapes can be a little fuzzy. In this image I have water ripples coming up to the edge of the bird's head, and I want a clear, clean line to separate them. The next colors for the water are more yellows and some greens... which oddly enough means it might be time to print blue. Or maybe I'll just procrastinate some more and print some red eyes.

And if you followed all that... well. Clearly it's not my mental state we should be questioning, is it?

4 comments:

  1. lol!!I understood all of that :p

    the piece glows :D

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  2. Nice work! Love your stuff. I follow right along but need to ask if the Mylar was only used the protect the parts on the block that you did not want to get the gray ink on. I think that's how you were using the masking .... Right?

    :)

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  3. Yeah, well, Jen... um... I think I've "known" you long enough by now to somehow not be surprised. ;-)

    Doug... Correct! I used a bird-shaped hole cut in a piece of mylar to mask off the areas that didn't want ink. I think the mask will come out again before this is all over....

    ReplyDelete

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