Linocut in Progress: Finishing the goldeneye

Okay, then... let's try to find some sort of resolution for this piece, shall we? 

Of course there must be more chaos first. 

The male goldeneye is a wonder of bold, graphic, black and white plumage. Which is why I needed to stop and make the head green.

I assure you, this makes perfect sense. Well, maybe not perfect. But some sense, certainly. Because of course there is some light shining in this world of ochre and brown water, and when it does it will create a patch of sort of iridescent green in the dark feathers of the bird's head. So: Green.

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 11 rollup

The roll-up looked alarmingly green, but remember it's printing over a mid-tone ochre (excuse me... I've been told I should call it caramel) color, so it will lose some of its green-ness. Like this:

Step 11 printed

Yep. This all looks like a chaotic mess right now. Time to try a bit of unifying... um.. brown... to bring it all together and help me see what needs to happen next.

Step 12 rollup

And it does help. I think the water is 95% finished now, so most of that material will come out of the block. However, there is the little problem of the bird's eye and the reflections of the eye needing to be more yellow. 

Step 12 printed

Here was an opportunity to make the concept of "spot inking" quite literal. Little spotty masks and some brighter yellow added... let's call this Step 12.5:

Step 12.5 printed

Okay. I think that will do for the yellow. Let's focus on these last dark bits to bring it all together.

Step 13 rollup

Some not-quite-darkest shapes need to go in the water, and I want to get another bit of subtle tone in the bird, so I rolled up this not-quite-black.

Step 13 printed

Ooph. This is a super-contrasty photo, so it hardly seems like there's room to add one more dark, but there is, and it must be done! The bird and its reflection get the only ink application here. You might notice that I didn't carve away the rest of the block. The prints were dry enough that the remaining un-inked areas weren't going to cause any problems, so I just left them. 

Step 14 rollup

Finished! And here's a proper scan that gives you a better idea of the value balance than the previous in-progress photos. It took me a silly amount of time to settle on a title, but I got there eventually.

"Spot of Gold"
reduction linocut, edition of 20
©Sherrie York

A larger image can be seen on my website... and the first print of the edition is already winging its way to Ann Korologos Gallery in Colorado. If you find yourself in the neighborhood, stop by and give him a wave. 

Linocut in Progress: Changes big and small

Back to the current linocut in progress. (Although, spoiler alert: It's already done and a framed print is already on its way to Ann Korologos Gallery in Colorado. It's probably not correct to call it "in progress" if it's already finished. But maybe I'm overthinking this.)

ANYWAY... After all that mucking about trying to find the right blue, it was a bit of a relief (see what I did there?) to get some straightforward swaths of ink on the block.

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 7 rollup

It feels a bit odd to be using all this warm color to create water reflections, but that's what drew me to the image in the first place. Getting the mixes rights has been a bit more challenging than expected; it was easy to go too dark too quickly.

Step 7 printed

And then, as if a lot of ochre water wasn't weird enough, it was time to start adding brown.

Step 8 rollup

But wait! This is a goldeneye, if you aren't from the Americas and haven't already guessed. Golden. Eye. Can't let the bird's head get all dark and gloomy before its eponymous feature is added, so it was a good idea to mask out the bird at this stage.

Step 8 mask

Okay, then. This is looking... odd. It was at this point that I really started to question all my life's choices. Was this going to end up looking like anything nice at all, or was the entire thing a bad idea? These thoughts are pretty typical in the middle stages of a reduction print, though. At least that's what I always tell myself. "Keep going. It might resolve okay. Hopefully. Surely. Maybe."

Step 8 printed

But if you think the water looks rather busy NOW, just wait. It's about to get really psychedelic. 

Step 9 rollup with mask

Look at all those crazy squiggles! Honestly, this was quite fun to carve, although it took longer than expected. I believe I added a bit of blue to the brown at this point... feeling a need to pull a little more coolness into this overly warm color palette.

Step 9 printed

And now for the point at which I had to summon all my patience. The temptation to run on and just finish this crazy water was high, but I have put off some of the bird details too long already. The most immediate need is to get that golden eye (and its reflection) on the paper.

Step 10  spot ink rollup

I realize this yellow looks almost absurdly bright, but remember that it is going on over a bunch of mid-value ochre. I made this ink as opaque as I could while still staying bright yellow, and then cut a mask to at least roughly contain it. I'm not worried about these shapes being much larger than they need to, because I know I have a couple of much darker passes to go over them later.

Step 10 mask to contain color

As expected, the yellow wasn't opaque enough to cover what was already in place, especially in the reflection. At this point I did kick myself a little for not tackling this yellow a little earlier... but the fussiness of the blue had been so aggravating that I just wanted to print some stages that would show actual progress. Instead I've created one more "fussy" step for myself, since I had to print the yellow twice to get the coverage I needed. 

I am reminded of a mug my friend Brenda gave me many years ago. It says, "It could be that the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others." She knows me so well.

Step 10 printed

Here was the print before the second application of yellow. Another, different, odd bit of color also needed to be applied to the bird's head, and I did that before I beefed up the yellow again. But I'll leave all that as the cliffhanger for the next post!

Linocut in Progress: That missing blue, and the trouble that came with it.

Part of why I decided to tackle the current linocut in progress was that it gave me an opportunity to work with a different and unexpected color palette. Spoiler alert: This image is mostly ochres and browns. 

But one of the most important elements of the image IS the blue one might expect from reflections on a bird on water. However, I've already got significant amounts of yellow ochre on the paper. I considered doing the blue patch immediately after the lightest yellow... from a get-the-color-right-and-give-it-some-luminosity standpoint it would have been the correct decision. But even when I cut a mask to try to contain the very distinct shapes, this blue is going to affect everything that goes on top of it. By cutting away and printing a second yellow before this step, I narrowed down the size of that affect.

It's hard to explain... so let me show you how it went. 

First... I cut a mask.

Or, more precisely, I cut a stack of masks. In a perfect world I would have made even smaller, more precise shapes... but it's just too difficult (read: impossible) to hand cut more than a dozen identical masks out of newsprint. Maybe if I had some sort of machine to cut them. But, no. I have me, and I have an Xacto knife.

Masks cut, it was time to mix the blue. It needs to be fairly opaque to cover the ochre that's already here, but I don't want to add so much white it looks chalky. Careful. Careful.

Step 4 rollup

You can see several color attempts at the upper edge of my work surface here. I knew the yellow underneath would darken this blue, so I made it as light as I dared without going chalky. Here it is masked on the press.

And printed.

Step 4 printed

Meh. I didn't love it. It looks quite dark, and a little bit gray... which was expected. I decided to go ahead and put this color on all the prints anyway, and resigned myself to a second blue run over the top of this one that would hopefully push things the direction I wanted.

I tried this:

Test blue for Step 5

Which brightened the blue but made it too dark. I am pretty sure I went ahead and printed this on all the prints, although I don't seem to have taken a photo. It's too dark, but it's very transparent and it will add some more "influencing" color to the blue that ultimately goes on top.

Because of course I mixed and tested a couple more blues and eventually settled on this. More white added than I wanted. Chalkier color. But not much else to be done. I had already sent a couple of prints to the reject "tester" pile.

Step 6 ink rollup

 I think you can see that I took advantage of having a sub-optimal blue already on the prints by carving a few little areas that would allow the "wrong" blue to still be present. Why not? A little more color variety never hurt anything.

Same mask shape applied:

Step 6 mask

And the resulting prints:

Step 6 printed

It wasn't perfect, but it was time to move on. There were several more darker layers to go around these blue shapes, so I just hoped additional darker values would visually brighten things up. 

Whew. That was a lot of work to get a little color on less than a third of the entire image. Let's hope the rest of this is a little more straightforward! 

(Spoiler alert #2: It wasn't. Not particularly, anyway.)

Linocut in Progress: New year, new image

 Okay... I realize we are already halfway through February, but I've studiously avoided too much social media since the beginning of the year, which somehow has included not posting work in progress.

And, full disclosure: This image gave me some headaches early on, so not posting took away at least a little of the "performance anxiety" that gets added when I'm publishing progress in real time. 

Enough excuses! Let's start a linocut!

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 1 spot ink rollup

I don't think I've had an image start quite this boring in a long time... but here we go. No surprises here– the subject matter is a bird on the water. But it's a bird with a white belly, and I wanted a slight value shift in the reflection of that belly. Just a skosh of light gray needs to be here, so I did some spot inking and cut the first of what would end up being several newsprint masks.

Step 1 mask

Step 1 printed

Honestly, it hardly seems worth the effort, since most of this little patch of gray will still be covered by other colors, but there are few things worse than getting all the way to the end of a process and realizing if you'd only done one small thing FIRST, the end result would be better. *

(* Okay, there are a LOT of things worse than this. But when it happens, the disappointment is real!)

On to Step 2! A very straight-up color roll. But... whhaaaaaaaaaaat? What is with all this yellow? Where is Sherrie Standard Step 2 Blue?

Step 2 rollup

Step 2 printed

Yep, that's yellow. (Well, a pale yellow ochre, but you know what I mean.) And just wait. It's going to get worse. 

But as an aside– Come on, birders. I bet you already know what species this is.

Remember how I said three sentences ago that the yellow was going to get worse? Not kidding. No photo of the ink rollup, but it's pretty obvious what happened here.

Step 3 printed

At this point I was already questioning the wisdom of getting this much ochre on the page this early. Let's call that foreshadowing, and leave the headache that resulted from this decision for my next post, shall we?