Wood Duck linocut: Steps 13-16

It's back to that attention-hogging male wood duck for the next step of the linocut-in-progress. It's nice, however, that he's starting to feel like a solid being and not a disjointed collection of color shapes.

Step 13

The water is very flat, but I don't want to go too crazy with it. My tendency is to get lost in all the fun contrasting shapes, but this time I'm trying to keep everything in a slightly more subdued palette. It is raining, after all.

A transparent blended green was rolled onto the entire block at this stage, which I like to do in order to tie everything together. Sort of like a thin glaze in painting.

Step 14. Livening up the water. Blended green roll printed.

Step 15. A little more action in the water.

Looking pretty okay, but I wanted some more action without letting the overall background get too busy. One more solid green pass over the entire block brought everything around.

Step 16. Things get silly.

There are two tiny shapes of color in the bills of both the male and the female. Really ridiculous to put them in, so of course that's right where I went. I temporarily abandoned the color for the male's bill... I might try to put it in by hand later. But the female now looks a bit like Jimmy Durante, with a big pink schnoz.

Everything is very tacky-wet at this stage... a lesson in patience when the end seems so near. But then again, I think I see five more things that need to be done before it's finished. (sigh)