Linocut in Progress: Oh, look. Starting with blue. How unique.

Okay... where the heck were we? Or, more accurately, where the heck have I been?

The story of that is long and sort of boring, involving tedious experiences with illness and such that have left me with distracted focus. Distracted focus has meant some disasters in the studio.... You know how it goes. 

A couple of weeks ago I decided to take on a "simple" and small piece, just 5 x 7 inches, to remind myself that I do know what I am doing. Ha! Just wait until you hear what happened. 

But for now... let's begin as though we DO know what we're doing. 

Step 1 rollup

Linocut in progress: Step 1

Look! It's a blue blended roll! We haven't seen that more than, oh, a zillion times. But it's certainly comforting to start with something familiar. Bird geeks... any guesses? Because of course there's a bird in here.

It's a nice background, but a bit blasé, so I decided that a subtle texture could make it a little more interesting. 

Enter the chipping of many small dots. Well, not dots, really. I think of dots as round and regular. These are more random in both shape and distribution. Let's call them... divots?

I created many divots in the upper portion of the background, but completely cleared the area around the vegetation in the lower portion. Don't want things to get TOO crazy, do we?

Step 2 rollup

Step 2 printed

Carrying on... time for another blended roll. Oh look! It's exactly the same as the previous blended roll. Okay, maybe not exactly. I darkened the gray slightly. I did say I was going for subtle here. 

Things felt pretty satisfactory so far, but we are only two steps in, so there haven't been many opportunities for things to go wrong. 

However.

If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you will know that every summer since I moved to Maine, I have trouble with the bed of my press. Despite a small dehumidifier in the studio, the heat and damp conspire to buckle the laminate. My neighbor has helped me fix it a few times, and right now the upper surface is cooperating... but the lower surface is buckled and it's causing some uneven pressure problems. 

On a small piece like this it isn't too much of an issue, but there were other problems lurking. I almost always print on dry paper, but when the humidity level inside the studio creeps towards 75%, "dry paper" is a relative term. I eased back on the press pressure from the beginning, but as we will see soon... it wasn't enough.

Step 3 rollup

Step 3 printed

But let's not worry about that just now. Time to clear away all those meticulously-carved divots and call the background finished. And time to do a little detail work on the bird. 

The male of this species has a lovely straw-colored back-of-the-head featherdo (not to be confused with hairdo), so it's time for a little spot inking. No need to be particularly careful here, as most of the yellow will be covered by a much darker tone later. 

Full disclosure: I went back and printed this color a second time, just in the bird's head, because I felt it needed to be a bit more intense. I neglected to take a photo, though... maybe because I went with friends to the fair... for the first time since 2019... and got distracted by THIS FACE. I mean, come on. 

Yep, I'm distracted again now. Wandering off to think about cute goats. More.... later.....