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.