Linocut in Progress: The final puffin

Well, it's not really the final puffin. At least not in the sense that the species is lost or I won't ever make any images of them again. You know what I mean. Final print stages. Which sometimes feel like they'll be the end of me, but that's a whole 'nuther story.

As you may recall from about 10 days ago, I had spent some time messing around with the red markings on the rocks, trying to get the shadow right.

"fixer" block

I still wasn't happy with it... so I did something I rarely do. I cut a "fixer block."

I traced the shape of the shadow on to an old blemished block I had floating around. Too lazy to clear ALL the material (and you never know when I might need one of the other corners to patch something else), carved the shape and then cut a mask for inking. I COULD have done this without cutting the block at all, but I didn't.

Because this block is considerably smaller than the full image block it made for some interesting paper management issues... but I propped some other uncut blocks around it and everything went fine.

 Puffin linocut: Step 11, shadow detail

 So.. with that problem solved it was time to face my biggest fear: The background. (Which is why so much progress was made on the little eider print. I face my fears by avoidance.)

With so much "noise" in the foreground rocks I wanted to keep the background simple... but by now there are several layers of color there already. And of course I wanted to do a big blended ink roll.... when my largest roller is 8" wide and the print is 12" x 18". Should have done this earlier in the process. Didn't. More avoidance.

I'm sorry to say that despite all this dramatic build-up I FORGOT to take a photo at this stage. Mostly I was just so tired that all I wanted to do was clean up and go to sleep. Hand-rubbing this big blend with so much ink below it took about 15 minutes per print... and I had 20 of them.

While the undocumented Step 12 was drying I went back to the eiders, AND set about the task of clearing all that background material from the puffin block.

 There was a lot of it.

But now the focus is on the puffin itself, and that's pretty fun. With less material to ink and print things went a bit faster, too.

Puffin linocut: Step 13

So... it's a huge jump now! Background in place, rocks coming together, and puffin appears! The color in this shot is way too... something. Gray. Muted. Warm. An artifact of shooting at night under a "color-balanced" lamp that I later discovered had a bulb out.

The last step took a little longer than I expected, just because I decided I didn't need as much of this darkest color in the rocks as I had on the first print. In addition, I tackled the printing a little sooner than I should have, so to avoid pulling up the previous color I had to wipe down the block on every other impression. Once I started I couldn't stop, so it was a late night... but I slept well knowing this was finished satisfactorily! All it needs now is a title. Ideas?

Puffin linocut: Step 14. Embiggenable with a click, if you want.