Let's wrap up this scoter linocut, shall we?
There has been some serious neglect going on for the one female bird in this image. Overall she should be a tiny bit warmer in tone than her male counterparts, so I rolled up a warm mid-gray and did some spot inking.
I cut a mask to keep that warm gray out of the head of the male bird immediately in front of her, but I neglected to take a photo of it. (Consider this practice for your imagination muscles.)
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| Step 8 printed |
That seems fine, so let's get on with the drama of the last dark color passes! The Step 9 rollup looks black, but it's more of a transparent charcoal-y color. We're not quite ready for the darkest darks just yet.
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| Step 9 rollup |
As you can see, there is still a good amount of this dark color printing in the water reflections.
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| Step 9 printed |
Okay. That feels pretty good. Now I can remove almost all of the background material, since only a few small shapes in the water directly below the male birds remain to be printed.
It was here that I decided to try something I had not done before! Ooh. Exciting! (Well, maybe not exciting. Let's just call it... different.)
I wanted one more dark value in the female bird, but I didn't want it to be AS dark as in the males. But I also didn't want to make a separate pass if I could avoid it. I decided to ink the entire block with this final black(ish) color, and then to wipe most of the color off of the female bird before I ran the block through the press. In theory enough ink would remain on the block to print, but with less contrast.
You can see in this photo that the female bird has been "wiped out" and is much lighter before printing...
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| Step 10 rollup |
Hey! Look at that! It worked! There is a third layer of detail in the female bird, but it's not as dramatically dark as in the males. (Yes, I know, all you intaglio printmakers out there. Plate wiping is part of every single impression you make. But somehow it never occurred to me until now that I could apply it to such a large shape on a relief print. Duh.)
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| Step 10 printed |
I was mostly ready to call these finished, except for that nagging little problem of some pale color at the very tip of the male birds' beaks. It's a tiny detail that most people probably wouldn't notice, but trust me. It's necessary.
Earlier in the process I had ruled out printing these little shapes with the press because there was a risk of the paper slipping, even in my registration jig. There's not enough "sticky" surface area in a 1/4" inked shape to reliably grab the paper.
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| Step 11 mylar stencil |
I cut the tiny shapes in a sheet of clear mylar. (You can see some other squiggle marks on the mylar, I used this piece multiple times to create patterns for my newsprint masks.)
I used a stiff stencil brush to "pounce" the color on to each print by hand. The color is terrible in this close-up... it all looks quite yellow... but I think you can see that this creates a nice, thin layer of color that has the same texture as ink printed from a block. "Just painting on" the color would present a different texture and be quite jarring.
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| Pochoir stencil detail |
Yes. Exactly right. A subtle difference, but a necessary one. And now it's all finished...
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Surf Scoters, reduction linocut, edition of 20-ish (I haven't sorted them yet)
©Sherrie York |
... well, except for a title. I haven't quite sorted that out yet. I'm trying to think of something clever to suggest that the males are hanging about trying to get the female's attention... without using so many words! ("The Popular Girl"? "Act Casual"? "Three's Company"? "The Dating Game"? Yikes. Too many 70s television references!)
What's up next? I'm undecided. I've been kicking around a couple of ideas, but not feeling a strong pull towards any of them yet. I have a bordering-on-abstract one that I'd like to try... but shhhhhh! I'm a tiny bit afraid of it. Don't tell anyone.
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