Linocut in Progress: A near-disaster averted.

Aaaaaaaanndddd.... as anticipated, we have reached the "ugly duckling" stage of this linocut, the point at which I question every choice ever made in my entire life, especially the one that involved putting ink and paper together for a living.

There's really no good reason for this print to already be at Step 7 and only have the blooms of the flowers resolved, but that's where things stand. It's time to start thinking about stems, leaves, and the still-avoided background.

The first question to answer is "How the heck are we going to get green over all this lavender?"

Just as a reminder, here's what the last step (number 6) looked like:

Where we last left our hero: Step 6

That's a lot of lavender... and it's nice and harmonious. It's going require the serious pulling up of my Big Printmaker Pants to move on from here.

I knew whatever color I printed next would need a lot of opaque white ink in it. It's impossible to get back to "white white," even if I used straight white ink on the image, but I can at least get things moving in the right direction. I mixed up a sort of "pistachio ice cream" pale green:

Step 7 ink rollup... pale, pale green

And I got this:

Reduction linocut, Step 7

Not what you were expecting, I bet. It was sort of what I was expecting. I had hoped for a little bit lighter value, but the grayness was no surprise. Remember your basic color theory, everyone! Colors that are opposite on the color wheel (blue-orange, green-red, purple-yellow) tend to dull each other out. A yellowy green over a lavender just does what it has to. I went ahead and finished this color pass just as it was, because I couldn't really see a way to get a better solution at this point. I crossed my fingers I could fix it in the next pass.

And I did. I mixed a brighter, but still loaded with white, green for Step 8, and now things look undeniably vegetative. But there's a new problem. The flowers look SO washed out! The richness of the lavender seems to have faded away with the addition of these last two color passes.

Reduction linocut, Step 8

Yes, I admit it. I considered scrapping the entire thing at this point. Because if I have to darken the flower petals the only way to do that would be to cut a second block... and trying to match those shapes? It didn't bear thinking about.

So after a day or two of nail biting I decided I should go ahead and try one more color pass to see if I could bring the blooms back to life. If not... well... I was resigned to the need for a do-over.

Step 9 rollup

I decided that if I was potentially going to pitch the entire thing anyway I might as well go for the bold, so I mixed up a blended roll of dark-to-light (and bright!) green.

Step 9 printed

Hooray! That worked okay, didn't it? The flowers are back to their lovely lavender selves... and the background seems to at least have a direction.

And speaking of the background... there's no more time to avoid decision-making here. I would like to keep things from getting too visually complex... let the two blooms continue to be the focus. Perhaps I'll keep the upper part of the background a solid shape and muck around a bit more with the foliage in the foreground. Time to make a couple of computer printouts and get out the pencils and see what I can sort out.