Linocut in Progress: Where were we?

Apparently there were 6 layers of blue on this snow scene linocut when I left for parts east at the beginning of July.

As a reminder, here's where things stood when I shut the door on the studio:

Step 6 recap

With almost two months to hang on the rack undisturbed, all of the prints-in-progress were of course quite dry. I was marginally worried about this, as it's possible to have adhesion problems when previous ink layers are TOO dry ("dry rejection"). I added a small amount of Setswell compound to a bit of the last purple-blue ink I'd saved from June (!!!), added a little bit of black, mooshed it all in to some additional transparent base, et voila:

Step 7

Everything went so smoothly that I tried to go ahead and print another color yesterday. The results were less than perfect, so rather than carry on and risk trashing too many prints, I cleaned everything up and went to bed. Or tried to go to bed. I'd had a weird craving for iced coffee in the afternoon, which I indulged and then regretted. There are reasons I don't drink much caffeine.

This morning I indulged not in iced coffee but in "pajama printing," which I haven't done in ages. I rolled out of bed, threw my apron on over my pjs and set to work.

It was all more challenging than I expected! Like a scene from some warped version of The Three Bears, the first color I mixed was too dark, the second too light. However, Goldilocks did not strike printmaking "just right-ness" on the third try, either. Nor on the fourth. I trashed several prints and did a lot of scraping and stripping and reprinting before I finally settled on this:

Step 8

The differences might be hard to identify at first, but look in the middle distance. The tree trunks are now in front of the snow bank, and there's a slightly darker bit even further back.

Now I think it's finally time to be done with blues, hooray! The next step might be the "ugly duckling" stage, as I will have to lighten up most of the tree trunks before adding more darks. In all I think it's coming along okay... and I'm hoping to be finished with it by next week. I need a brand-spankin'-new piece for a September 1 deadline, and this is (hopefully) going to be it!