Sunday, October 11, 2020

Linocut in Progress: The maybe-not-ugly-but-certainly-not-attractive duckling stage

As I mentioned in my last post, it's time to move away from the pleasant and harmonious color scheme we've had so far and put in the contrasting orangey parts of the male ducks. 

Since only small areas of the finished image will need these orangey shapes, I can use a combination of spot inking and masks to move the process along. I used the same piece of acetate as before, placed it over my carved block, and traced my new shapes in blue instead of pink.

Another mask pattern

Again, I used this pattern to create newprint masks... like this: 



Step 6 mask, ready to print

It took a couple of tries to get the first of my two orangey colors right. This paler color will be the highlighted areas.

Step 6 ink rollup

Before you see this next photo I have to apologize for the continued poor quality of my in-progress images. Now that the sun has made a seasonal shift it's difficult for me to find a spot in the studio with natural light for photography,  so these have all been very dull and and strange, with glare from artificial lights... But hopefully you get the idea...

Reduction linocut in progress, Step 6 printed,
embiggenable with a click

Awkward little shapes, but sufficient for now. I did just a tiny bit of carving and then used spot inking...

Step 7 rollup

and the same newsprint mask....

Step 7 on the press with mask in place. See what I mean about dodgy light?


And heeeeerreee's Step 7 printed. The orange looks particularly harsh in this photo, but it's not nearly this bright. And a lot of it will be obscured by future color passes, anyway. 

Reduction linocut, Step 7 printed,
slightly embiggenable with a click

Thankfully the next color pass will be a blue-gray that should start to pull the image back together again, because all these awkward-looking prints on the drying rack make me feel very uncomfortable. Stay tuned!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Linocut in Progress: The Third Act

Time to wrap up this linocut ! And we are wrapping at warp speed (see what I did there?)... because there are deadlines. Exhibition deadline...