Linocut in Progress: Confusion and... warping?

 Right off the bat I will explain that the "confusion" of this post title is mostly to do with the fact that I dropped the ball on documenting the process of this linocut and I have struggled to sort out which of the (very few) photos I have goes with which step. (Yes, there are time stamps, but sometimes I shoot things out of order, or some steps look a lot like other steps!)

All of which is to say, "hang on, it's a bumpy ride."

But it starts well enough. Here's the ink rollup for Step 4:

Linocut in progress: Step 4 rollup

Pretty, right? A blended roll of light and cheery greens for the vegetation. You'll note I didn't ink across the bird. It wasn't necessary for the image, and it keeps an extra layer of ink out of that area.

Apparently at this stage I only took a photo that looks like this:

Step 4 printed

I also mentioned in the previous post that I had printed a second pass of the light yellow in the bird's head. I thought I had done that right away, but in this photo it appears I did it after this stage. Let's call the "head brightening" stage Step 4.5, because by Step 5 it's clearly in place. Yep. I'm confused. 

So confused that I didn't take a photo of the rollup for Step 5, but I'm going to guess it was a light transparent gray, because:

Step 5 printed

Actually, now that I look at this photo, I think there were two things happening in Step 5. There was a gray applied to the bird, and another blend of greens in the vegetation. You can see in the place where the bird and the leaves meet that there's a sort of fuzzy line... I believe I inked these two areas at the same time and just let them overlap. (Hey! It was a month ago! I can barely remember what I had for breakfast this morning.)

The next image in my photos looks like this:

Step 6 rollup

That seems like a nice, strong blended roll, which I think goes with the print on the right in this photo:

Step 6 printed (on the right). Step 7 on the left. And warping... everywhere.

And here is the point at which we need to address the issue that was causing me complete consternation. Can you see that these prints are not laying flat? They are buckled and warping. I have never had this much issue with stretching paper before! But then again... I have never experienced a summer as wet and rainy as this one before. 

Which is one reason I don't usually do a lot of printing in the summer. Other reasons are too much heat and a too-busy teaching schedule. But I was determined to get something done, so I kept plowing forward. What else was I going to do? Abandon the whole thing? I could... but... stubborn. My reasoning (such as it is) was that I could either throw all the prints away NOW.... or I could finish them and experiment with trying to flatten them. If those experiments failed, well... I'd still lose all the prints. But there was a chance I'd figure out a solution, so.....

Onward.

Step 7 ink rollup... nothing fancy.. just a transparent gray over all the block. 

Here's the ink rollup for Step 7:

Step 7 printed

And, judging by the look of it, I think I used another transparent gray (maybe the same one) for Step 8:

Step 8 printed

These are looking okay... but I'd like to break up all that green with some sort of red-brown. Maybe two color passes to go? And then... we'll see if they can be salvaged.