Linocut in Progress: In which things get even weirder

Two steps and a half dozen colors into this print I was sure it was going to be a spectacular disaster. For Step 3 I did a huge amount of carving, including removing large chunks of the background. Now and forever: Gone.

Which is, of course, why I did this crazy rollup:

Night Watch reduction linocut, Step 3

Yep. That's a bunch of straight-up opaque white with a blob of transparent purple in the middle. It's what you would have done, isn't it?

Of course the white wouldn't look white and the purple wouldn't look purple once printed...

Step 3 printed

Yeah. More weird.

But at least I now had a sense of the overall image and could start thinking about more relative color and tone. Most of the gray created by the white ink will be covered in subsequent passes, but it's good to have it for a few of the "brightest" areas of the tree.

Step 4 involved some carving in the tree and quite a bit more carving in the owl. I wanted to warm things up just a bit so I mooshed together a bunch of ink scraps from the previous print and came up with a sort of dark ochre, middling transparent.

Step 4 rollup

Yeah, no reason anything should go wrong here, either. (Rolls eyes)

Step 4 printed

Huh. Whaddaya know? First glimmers of hope appear. I might actually pull this off. Maybe. Possibly.