Linocut in Progress: Surprise! More gray

We aren't up to 50, or even 15, shades of gray yet, but golly there have been a lot of them in this linocut. In fact, here comes the sixth. 

In the previous post I might have mentioned shifting to another little bit of fiddly color, but then I decided I needed to bring some unity to the background... and I might as well add a little more texture to the foreground sand while I was at it. So. Step 9. Surprise! Another very transparent gray. Please try not to snore when you nod off from boredom.

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 9 printed, another warm gray

It might not have been exciting, but it was useful for helping me to visualize a direction for the background. As I lamented in my last post, I'm rethinking the background shapes on the fly, and every little nudge towards some kind of structure suggests what my next steps could be.

Having said that... now is the time to forget about the background and deal with a couple of very small, fiddly bits of color in the bird. The plover's beak is a sort of yellow-orange at the base, as are its legs. I absolutely do not want this very-staining color to escape and wreak havoc over the rest of the image, so I will employ spot inking and a newsprint mask.

Step 10 spot inking

The inking part is easy enough. My smallest brayer is 1" wide, so it leaves some slop around my intended shapes, but inking goes quickly. In fact the most time-consuming aspect of this step was cutting all the newsprint masks.

Step 10 mask in place

Drumroll, please...

Step 10 printed

Okay, it's nice that my bird has a leg to stand on now. Two of them, actually. The color seems alarmingly bright at the moment, but most of it will be toned down in the next pass of... you guessed it. Gray!

Step 11 rollup. Oh, look. Gray.

As an aside I would like to point out the yellow stain on the block during this gray rollup. I scrubbed and scrubbed the block to remove this color and this was the best I could do. Thankfully the residue is clinging to the carved-out areas of the block and not to the surface. I learned the hard way that yellow ink stain on printable surfaces can transfer to your prints in places you do NOT want it, which can be a disaster. 

Thankfully there were no fussy masks to cut out for this stage and everything went along smoothly. 

Step 11 printed

But the foreground is definitely WAY too dark now, so the next color to print will be white. I'm hoping I haven't left it too long. The white ink will not look "pure" white, but that's just fine. I want to lighten the area, not cover it completely. 

There's carving to do first (more sand... chip chip chip) and drying of ink layers, so it will likely be a couple of days before I can print again. Stay tuned... I promise a bit more drama after the white pass. Honest!