Today I turned the corner in the progress of this new
linocut, so I've decided it's safe to start sharing it with you. It might be cruel to tell you I'm up to color 15 when I'm only going to share the first four steps right now... but be honest. You LIKE the suspense. And there's no way you'd want to wade through a single post of all the steps at once, anyway. Is there?
This is another large-ish piece: 15" x 15." And I think before too many steps go by you might detect a theme....
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Step 1: Do you know what it is yet? There's actually enough information here,
if you can see it. |
The strange thing about this piece is that I'm doing a bit of reduction-within-
reduction. The first several steps were all inked through a mask and just a tiny portion of the block was removed after each color. (Full disclosure: I did a bit of rough Photoshopping on this image in an attempt to conceal the identity of the subject for at least half the post. Hi, Jacque!)
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| First mask, step 2 |
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| Step 2 printed |
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| Step 3, a second yellow |
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| Step 4. North American birders are probably on to me by now. |
I think the tricky bit will be holding those thin white lines through all of the steps yet to come. Registration gods, please smile upon me.
Wood Duck? and rain? Some coincidence here, wait until you see what I'm working on.
ReplyDeleteThat's pretty funny, Stuart. Yes. Wood Duck and rain. Can't wait to see how you tackle it... this one's going okay, but I can see several things I might do differently next time. As always!
ReplyDeleteWood duck in the rain--he's going to be gorgeous! Your techniques are leaping forward. It's fun to see that growth.
ReplyDeletewiat, I'm fairly new to your blog, but as i was reading this post I saw the picture demonstrating the mask. Was that a transparency that you cut out? could you describe that? I'm interested to see how you did that!
ReplyDeleteHi Chip... Yes, the mask is just cut from a piece of clear acetate (duralar is what this particular product is called). Depending on the complexity of the shape and how many times you'll be using it you can cut a mask from paper, too. I use it to ink "selectively" in a reduction print. This print ended up having 22 or 23 colors and I didn't want to have that many layers of ink over the entire sheet. Make sense?
ReplyDeleteah brilliant! yeah that makes a lot of sense. I have done some reduction prints before and I have gotten frustrated some times because my print keeps building up with layers, and the print becomes heavy and colors peak out of the edges where you didn't want color to be. This makes a lot of sense! haha, I learned something new and now I want to try it! Thanks for sharing.
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