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!