Linocut in Progress: Back to the Swallows

I've managed to finish painting a second sheet of tiny birds and have a third ready to go, but I wanted to get back to work on this swallow piece first. It's potentially an image with long-term ramifications which I'm not yet able to announce, and it needs to be done before the end of the month. So... it's back to the press.

Swallow linocut, Step 4

Hm. I fail to understand why this image looks so dark in Blogger. It's a lot cheerier in P-shop, and far less grainy. Weird.

Ah ha! It's the fault of Google, which now "auto enhances" one's images unless one turns the feature off. Just for grins, this is how horrible the image looked when Google "fixed" it:

Anyway... this step was a nice purple-to-blue blended roll. In the top photo you can see that I'm still having a little trouble with lap marks, although in real life it's not nearly as pronounced as it looked in the "enhanced" (snark) image.

Swallow linocut, Step 5

I considered leaving the background plain at this point... but that little bit of uneven color made me uncomfortable, so I decided to go for some subtle texture to visually break up the unwanted line. Yep, I think a little background interest was just the ticket to break up the unevenness.

From here all the background marks will be removed and the focus will be entirely on the birds. This makes me a little nervous from a registration point of view. Two greens and two browns and it will be finished... I hope I can hold it together!