Linocut in Progress: Pressing away the blues

One often hears people describe art-making as a means to express themselves and their emotions. Personally, my process usually is more of an intellectual puzzle... and sometimes a distraction from emotional upheaval. This week brought sad news from back home in Colorado, and it was comforting to focus on the routines of working while I processed the loss of a friend. 

It seemed appropriate that the image was now calling for blues. It took a while to find the right tonal range, as evidenced by the many ink mixes across the top of my work area. Because I am working with so much transparency, all of these colors will be influenced by those already on the print... and none will look like what I've rolled out on the glass. Did I mention the intellectual puzzle aspect of working? What color is on the print already? How do I want it to change in the next color pass? What color do I need to put on top of it to achieve that change? Is that change one of temperature or value or both?

And of course using blended colors multiplies all those questions, since layering blends creates even more color relationships. Wheeee!

Reduction linocut in progress, Step 4 ink rollup. Three blended blues.

But it's fun when the puzzle pieces start to fit together. My goal at this stage was to hold on to those lovely greens at the top and create small halos of lavender around some of the bubbles. (Hopefully this will soften some of those contours.) A three-value blend seemed to be the solution.

Reduction linocut in progress, Step 4 printed

Okay! Good. Mostly. I see now that the lavender color could have been brighter, but I was afraid of going too far and creating something visually jarring. That it ended up a little too subtle... well, that will just have to do. 

Step 5 ink rollup, two blended blues

As much as I loved these soft tones I did need to beef up the value range, so after some more carving I pulled out all the leftover blue inks from the previous printing session and started mixing them together. The goal was to get some good mid-tones and unify the foreground and background, so this time I just mixed two shades of blue and crossed my fingers. 

Step 5 printed

Whew. That worked out okay and it's looking pretty good. I think there's just one more pass to be done in the water, and then a couple of spot inking passes for the bird and voila! We might actually make it to the finish in fewer than 10 steps this time! (But you know better than to hold your breath on that one, don't you?)