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.