Linocut in Progress: Let's wrap this up!

 Okay...  Remember that cartoon in which a couple of scientists stand at a chalk board filled with complex equations, at the bottom of which is the phrase, "And then a miracle occurs"? 

That's kind of how the documentation of this linocut seems to have gone. A bunch of photos and a few steps that seem to be missing and then the piece is somehow done. So..... somehowwww..... Art=Science. Yay! We knew that.

Step.... let's call it 11....

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 11

Hey, this looks like more spot inking. Which I had warned you about in the last post. Perhaps I am psychic. (Or perhaps this piece was already finished when I wrote that last post and I have just been drawing things out for dramatic effect. You don't know.)

Some green in the head, another grey across the back, and oops! I had missed a little bit of rust color in the reflection last time. 

Hard to tell what's happening in the small images of the overall print, so how about I show you a detail for Step 11?  It's still not great.... this thing has been crazy-hard to photograph. But now you can see that there's a little more detail in the head and some subtle color in the the reflections. 

And here's where that miracle mentioned above comes into play. It appears there was another pass of some transparent gray over the bird's head and back, but I don't have any photos for it. Also some more spot inking in the head... tiny areas... ditto. 

Here's what things looked like after Step 12 or 13...

Step 13... Super hard to tell what has changed!

But now we are in the home stretch. One last dark gray-green to hit just some details in the head and those lovely feathers on the side....

Step 14 rollup

And then I waited a couple of days until the prints were dry enough that I could get an actual scan... This image is slightly embiggenable if you click on it.

Merganser linocut (needs a title!), Click to embiggen!

So, whew! That's the first new reduction linocut of the year all finished. I'm sidetracking for a couple of days to work on another project, and then hopefully there will be another one underway next week. 

Linocut in Progress: Complications. Of course.

Honestly. If I had a dollar for every time I thought I'd reach the end of a linocut in "just a couple more simple steps" I'd be a gazillionaire. This is art-making, after all, and if you are somehow still harboring the illusion that "being an artist" is all rainbows and "doing the thing you love" I am afraid I must burst that bubble for you. A lot of it is, quite simply, a slog. Or it involves a lot of hair-pulling and bashing-upon-the-table of one's forehead. Or all of the above.

At its most basic, my job is to create problems for myself and then somehow find my way out of them. Mostly I am better at creating problems than solving them. But hey. We all have our skills.

If it's not enough to confuse myself with the actual making of linocuts, I also confuse myself in my attempts to record the process. I've got a bunch of photos. Let's see if we can make any sense out of them.

Reduction linocut in progress: Steps... Hm. 7 and 8? Or 8 and 9?

I have this photo, and while it obviously represents two steps, I'm not sure if they are 7 and 8... or 8 and 9. In my last post I did the spot inking for the head, beak, and breast of the bird... Step 7. That should be it at the bottom of the photo, but it seems a little dark. I might have run a layer of transparent gray over the whole bird at this point, or it might just be that the light was different in the studio that day. 

Either way, the print on top represents a clear next step... and here was its roll-up:

Let's call this Step 8

Step 8 printed

And here's where things got a little more.... well.... more. My original "plan" (like I ever have a plan) was to keep the bird and its reflections really close together in value and very gray in tone. But at this point I thought the whole piece would get better with "just a bit" more color. Back to spot inking! A gray-green and a red in the bird's beak and eye, and the reflections below.

Step 9 rollup

Ugh. I know... All these stages were hard to photograph, so this image isn't great. But you get the idea, I hope.

Step 9 printed

So nowww....

Step 10 rollup

Back to an overall gray. Fairly transparent. 

Step 10 printed

This particular photo seems pretty true to color and value for this stage, so maybe let's stop here and take a breather. The whole piece seems so close to completion, but something is still not quite right. I predict more spot inking on the horizon.