Linocut in Progress: Getting ahead of the season?

When I was in high school (about a million years ago) my first "real" job was working in a retail clothing store. I remember being surprised/not surprised to unpack new inventory and find we were going to start hanging winter coats on the racks in July. It was 95 degrees outside and I was wrestling fleece, down, and (not always fake in those days) fur. 

Which all to say that you might be surprised/not surprised that I have decided to work on a strictly autumn scene for the current linocut in progress. Maine is in the throes of steamy green summer right now, but I am ready to think about my favorite time of the year... with crisper, drier air and a bit more color variety in the trees.

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 1 rollup

There's not going to be much in this image that needs to stay the white of the paper, so only a few cuts were required before I was rolling up a yummy blended yellow-to-peach first color pass.

Step 1 printed

And whaddaya know? I'm also working in a vertical format. What? That doesn't seem to happen very often. 

No time to debate the whys and wherefores of verticality. We have lino to carve!

Step 2 rollup

And, wheeeeee! Some brighter yellow and a more intense peachy color. Let's gooooo!

Step 2 printed

Well, would you look at that? I think we can already tell there might be a tree or two (or twenty) in this image. At this point I started to get mildly concerned about a lot of confusing color shapes that need to inhabit the lower third of the image... but I successfully put my imagined fingers in my mental ears (because my real fingers were rolling ink, of course!) and avoided making any decisions. Let's put some more orange on now instead!

Step 3 rollup

Yep. That is definitely orange. Is it too much? Maybe... maybe not.....

Step 3 printed

It definitely seems like a lot of orange, but I refuse to panic just yet. I might do so on the NEXT step, however, since I need to jump in and adjust the color of the tree trunks. These are aspen trees, so their trunks are white. But they are also in the shade, with all of the color coming from backlight... so they are more of a middling purple-gray. 

It's a color that will be tricky to achieve over all these warm tones, but I did NOT want to cut a ridiculously complicated mask to isolate all the trunks. I'm hoping that a long-ago experience in a similar situation will rescue me from myself once again. 

Yep, it's time to cross our fingers and do a little dance for the gods of Opaque White! They'll never let us go back to white-white, but I'm hoping they'll give us a useful base tone from which we can build our new trunk color. 

Stay tuned!

Linocut in Progress: (Lucky 13th) Final Step

 I am off next week to head up the Arts & Birding session at Hog Island Audubon Camp in Maine, so I have been feeling the pressure to wrap up the current linocut and get on with workshop prep! 

The 10th color pass was a short and sweet one. There are four little periwinkle snails in this image, and I wanted to lighten their overall tone. This was accomplished with spot inking a semi-transparent layer of a very pale beige-y color. (Sepia plus white.) 

Step 10 - Spot inking and mask

I used a newsprint mask to contain the color even further, and, voila... periwinkles. 

Step 10 - Printed

For Step 11 we were back to a bit of alarming-looking color. 

Step 11 - rollup

I really only wanted a wee bit of that orangey color to get involved, and I did NOT want it in the rocks, so for each run through the press I stopped to wipe the color out of places I didn't want it to go. Tedious, but necessary.

Step 11 - Put the color on, take it back off

Step 11 printed

Okay, getting close now! Maybe just one more dark? How about a transparent sepia with maybe a skosh (technical term) of blue in it?

Step 12 rollup

Step 12 printed

And here's where I paced through the house and gnashed my teeth for a little bit. It could have been finished at this point. It probably was. But I waffled back and forth about putting just a few more darks in the deepest shadows of the rock weed. I already felt like the whole thing was a bit more "contrasty" than I wanted, and another dark would make it even more so. But I also didn't feel like I had quite the value range I wanted overall.

Okay.

One more dark.

Lucky Step 13 rollup

I added a surprising amount of blue to the existing sepia-dominant color. I wanted a little more cool in the shadows... everything is so warm! 

Final color pass. "Rockweed and Periwinkles," reduction linocut, 8x10, edition of 20

I honestly wasn't sure I'd made the right decision when I went to bed that night.... but by light of day I decided it was a good call, and I'm satisfied this piece is complete. 

Now. Will I have time to get another one prepped before I go to camp? Three days to go!