Carrying on in Studio V

Work routines in Studio V are starting to take shape, although there are still a number of details that need attention. Lighting is chief among them, and I hope to have some solutions in place in the next few days.

The new workbench works a treat, although I'm wishing now it were a little deeper. Might have to go back and see if I can't talk Ves out of the larger door/tabletop he has at the shop. Yesterday I bought a "stall mat" from the farm store and this morning the DM cut it down to a fit-in-front-of-the-workbench size. I'm hoping it's going to make my feet happier the next time I stand printing for 8 hours.

In between all the space-tweaking I'm still getting work done. Last week's 130+ tiny prints remain scattered over most horizontal surfaces. They're dry to the touch, but I'll wait a few more days before I package them up and send them to the exchange coordinator.

Coming up this Wednesday I'll be giving a printmaking demonstration at the monthly meeting of the Pikes Peak Watercolor Society, so yesterday I got down to work on a small (5 x 7 inches) linocut that I think I'll use at the presentation. Maybe. I never finished the piece I used as a demo at Birds in Art last month, so I might use that instead. It all depends on how things go tomorrow.

This morning I did a little damage control creative problem solving on the new print... by the second color I realized I had accidentally removed a section of lino prematurely. Oops. No problem, though. I had another uncarved block of the same dimensions! I made a stencil for the areas I wished to print, inked the uncarved block, and printed from it for color #3.

Good thing I had an uncarved block of the same dimensions.
I needed it to print from a stencil. Aka: covering up a boo boo.

Here we are with four passes down. My apologies for the worse-than-normal image quality here. My little point-and-shoot camera turned its toes up a couple of weeks ago and I haven't been able to replace it yet. I've been borrowing the DM's even older camera and I haven't yet come to terms with its particular idiosyncrasies.

The rest of the week, then, looks like printing... painting for a client... a demo... and hopefully some fieldwork time. Same old, same old. There IS, however, some excitement in the wings for tomorrow morning. It involves a truck, some young, strong guys, and a big hunk of metal. Stay tuned.