Linocut in Progress: It's time for masks!

We're just a week away from All Hallows Eve, so it's time to be thinking about masks! Well, it's time to be thinking about masks no matter what celebration might be approaching... because we're making a reduction linocut with some crazy contrasting color and we need to be sure we're putting our best face forward. (See what I did there?)

For Step 5 I got into the spirit of the season (Spirit! Get it?) and mixed up a rather pumpkin-y color. Thankfully this color will only appear in small areas of the finished image, so I could just do a little spot inking....

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 5 spot inking

And to be sure that ink was contained even more, I cut some newsprint masks. It's always a bit tedious to cut masks, but at least I kept the shapes simple this time.

Step 5, mask in place

I'm not sure whether the result should be called a trick or a treat. Possibly just an alarming foray into the ugly duckling (or in this case "ugly merganserling") stage.

Step 5, printed

After that little digression into a complementary color it was time to go back to... blue again. Still. More blue. The goal is to put some subtlety and interest into the reflections of sky in the water. The tricky thing is that eventually every other... water stripe, I guess we can call them(?)... will actually be reflecting trees, not sky, and will be green. It's not too troublesome to put green over blue, but I don't want the values to get too dark too soon. Nothing for it but to add another transparent layer, though. 

Step 6, rollup

I debated for quite a long time about whether I wanted to run this blue in the background of the upper fourth of this image, but in the end decided to cut another (even more simple... hooray!) mask for that section. Whether or not this will turn out to be a good decision remains to be seen.

Step 6, mask

But it was a simple rollup and a simple mask, and Step 6 moved along at a nice pace. 

Step 6, printed

I apologize for the thoroughly bad photography. I am often trying to shoot sample photos at less-than-optimal times of day... and these are looking quite dismal. 

So let's go ahead and throw in yet another step, with a photographic representation that looks a little better. Bring on Step 7!

Yes. We're at seven steps already and we're still messing about with blues. This is mildly annoying to me, even though it's no one's fault but my own. But I'm aiming for a subtlety that apparently requires stealth and a certain amount of slow sneaking up on it. At least that's my excuse for now.

Back to blue we go, although this time we're going for a bit of a blended roll.

Step 7, rollup

Some darker values closer to (and in the shadow of) the bird, fading to not much at the bottom of the image. Let's give that a try.

Step 7, printed

Okay, I think we'll settle on that. It's all a bit bright now, but I think that can be remedied with a transparent gray pass next time around. Let's give these a couple of days to dry and see what sorts of new problems we can make for ourselves, shall we?