Linocut in Progress: Did You See That?

Put on your deerstalkers and get out your magnifying glasses, because we're back to trying to sleuth out the order of operations on this small reduction linocut when we are in possession of insufficient documentation.

Our last clue we bravely (perhaps rashly) named Step 5. Here are a bunch of those prints at this stage... all politely waiting for whatever came next.

Reduction linocuts at Step 5. Maybe.

The next image I have in the chronology of my photos is this one, which seems to be the next rollup. We're back to a blue ink... although this one sports a bit more gray.

Step 6 rollup

And then I have this somewhat helpful photo comparing this stage with the next. 

Steps 6 and 7. Or are they?

But here's something tricky that happened somewhere in here, also. If you take a look at the birds' beaks, you'll notice there's a gray crescent that has been added somewhere along the line. I imagine that was a bit of spot inking.

Here's a better look at it.

Technically Step 7.5, I guess

I have a photo of the Step 7.5 rollup, but I do have this photo, which appears to be the final stage of dark ink.

Step 8 rollup

It's not exactly a black... but it reads that way in the end.

"Did You See That?"
Reduction linocut, 5" x 7"
© Sherrie York

So! We might not have found all the clues, but we deduced enough to declare the case solved. It might not have been elementary, dear Watson.... What started out as a "simple" image did, as so many of them do, turn out to be a bit more complex. But we can file this one under "Figured It Out Eventually" and move on to the next case!

Linocut in Progress: Little pair of puffins...

I didn't get much accomplished in the studio this summer, but I did manage a couple of little 5x7 reduction linocuts. Last week I posted the small rockweed print, this week we'll tackle some puffins. 

Once again the documentation is poor. The priority was just to DO something, and keeping close tabs on documentation was just a step too many. But I think there's enough information available to at least give us a clue about how it all unfolded.

Step 1! I carved for white and then rolled up a horizontal blend of blues.

Step 1 rollup with masks

Of course the most outstanding feature of a puffin is that ridiculous orange and yellow bill. I didn't want the blue of the water to interfere with these, so I cut some tiny newsprint masks to keep the beak area free of ink.

After this stage I carved some more shapes in the water and printed another blue blend, which was Step 2. The masking of the beaks continued.

Step 2 printed

Now it's time to tackle the aforementioned beaks, which I did with some careful spot inking. First some yellow for Step 3.

Step 3 printed, yellow spot inking

Next, a little more spot inking of the orange bits. Here's the rollup for Step 4. You can see there are some extraneous bits of color. I don't think that I used masking here; I believe I just went through and wiped those areas clean with a rag for each print. Tedious, but sometimes the best way forward.

Step 4 rollup, orange spot inking

In the photo below, the result of Step 4 is on top.... with a sneak preview of Step 5....

Steps 4  (top) and 5 (bottom) printed

Step 5 was a return to blue for more details in the water and some shadow shapes. 

Step 5 rollup

This pulled things back together a little bit and set me up for the next steps. We'll see if I can sleuth out the order of operations from other available photos. Stay tuned.

Step 5 printed

Trying something new. Or at least different....

Let's just say it: I am in a rut. And I have been for quite a while. I'm not excited about any of the ideas I have for linocuts... they all just seem to be variations on a theme. I'm flailing around, looking for an interesting spark.

Which is why I took a complete detour a few weeks ago and finally made a little TetraPak printing experiment. A what printing, you might ask? It's an intaglio process, like etching... but not nearly so involved as working on zinc or copper with all sorts of questionable materials, because the printing plate is a piece of TetraPak. You might know it as a soup box.

Talk about a low-tech plate!

Unless you've cut open your broth box and peered into its depths, however, you might not have realized that the inside is coated with a thin layer of foil. And that foil can be scratched with a needle, as one does when making a drypoint etching. The foil is, of course, squishier than a zinc or copper or acrylic plate, but if you're not worried about precision, it's good enough!

A little song sparrow, quickly scratched in TetraPak

It's probably been... ooph... 40 years (what!?!?) since I've inked and printed an intaglio plate. Unlike relief printing, which involves rolling ink on to the surface of the plate, intaglio printing requires pushing ink down into the incised lines and then wiping off the surface. A damp sheet of paper will press down into the lines and pull up the impression. 

All of which means that I had forgotten what a mess it can be to ink and wipe an intaglio plate. I definitely need a better system. But here's the inked plate:

Test plate ready to print!

I never did get a consistent combination of inking, wiping, paper dampness, and pressure, but I did get a nice set of experiments.

TetraPak test prints

Intaglio was my first printmaking love, although I learned to make etchings using zinc plates, aquatint rosin, nitric acid baths, asphaltum varnish, kerosene.... you get the idea. It wasn't a process I could maintain without a properly ventilated studio and the capacity to manage all those questionable chemicals. 

Some years ago (decades now, no doubt) there was a lot of excitement around the newish, less toxic process of solar plate etching. I never had an opportunity to learn how to make solar plates, although what little I knew seemed a step removed from the immediacy of drawing a needle across a treated plate to create an image. 

Using TetraPak felt a little more my "style," but I definitely need more practice to achieve any sort of consistency. And the "squishiness" of the foil doesn't seem to give me the control I'd like for making marks. Still, it was nice to take an afternoon to just play around... something I don't give myself nearly enough time for. 

Linocut in Progress: In Which We Start Fussing With the Little Things

After all that green it's time to start defining the tree and bird a bit more, and to start balancing the values. Let's warm things up a bit with a reddish-brown

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 10 rollup

It's a bit of a relief (pun intended) to get this color pass down and see that everything is holding together okay. Promising! But of course I saw a teeny thing that I didn't like... 

Step 10 printed

The top edge of the horizontal branch on which the bird is perched is too dark and harsh. It's a little thing... but it bothers me, so I will fix it with some spot inking. Nothing complicated, just a semi-transparent white rolled over that little section.

Step 11 rollup

Comparison below: Step 10 on the top, Step 11 on the bottom:

Step 10 vs 11, printed

There's not a lot of material left on the block at this stage... but somehow there are still several steps left to go. 

I think I can finally move away from the background and add some more details in the foreground tree. I don't seem to have a rollup photo for the next step, but I'm willing to bet you can tell it was a slightly darker brown layer. 

Step 12 printed

And now Step 13! Again, a dark brown, this one a bit cooler in temperature, to bring out the last (???) bits of detail in the tree. 

Step 13 rollup

Step 13 printed... 

Okay. We're getting close now. Maybe. I want to darken the details of the bird's head just a wee bit. But will that be the end? 

Spoiler alert: Nope.

Linocut in Progress: So Much Background!

Alright... back to the greens. Outside it's still gray. I need some cheer.

Step 7 rollup and mask

At this stage I needed to think more about not letting the green interfere with the bird and and the tree branch, so I cut some newsprint masks again. This print ended up being a festival of masking, and I realized it might have been easier to cut two different blocks from the get-go. Hindsight, and all that.

Step 7 printed

Again I worried that the green might be a bit bright... But there's that interesting phenomenon of colors appearing more saturated on gray, wet days... so I didn't want to lost that experience. Some of this green will be covered by other darks, so I crossed my fingers and pushed on.

Step 8 rollup

I wanted to tie things back together after the masking, a get a better sense of where I stood overall with values, so I mixed up a fairly transparent brown. The reddish tones would (I hoped) create darker, subtler greens while also warming up the tree and giving it some form. 

Step 8 printed

And can I just say how satisfying it is when an intention actually works out more or less as I envisioned? Whew.

Riding high on this satisfactory color pass, I decided to descend into pickiness and beef up some of the lichen color just a bit. Back to the fussy mask cutting. 

Step 9 and mask

TERRIBLE photo here... I actually took it as the print was hanging on the rack. But it did strengthen the color a bit, so on we go.

Step 9 (sideways photo hanging on rack)

Linocut in Progress: Getting away from gray

I dunno if it's just me, but it seems like we've had more than the usual number of gray days in the last month or two. As a child of the 300-days-of-sunshine-per-year interior West, these coastal winter days are hard for me. I don't mind some weather and atmosphere, but I really would prefer a different balance than the one we're currently in. 

Soooooooooooo.... Let's print some ridiculous green for Step 5 of the current reduction linocut in progress. 

Step 5 with mask

I jest (slightly), but it did take a few tries to hit the correct green for this stage. Initial attempts were waayyyyy too bright. Even after I settled on a color and printed the entire run, I wasn't sure it was quite right.

Step 5 printed

Yep. The next day I decided it was too much, too soon. Right color, wrong stage of the process. Nothing to do but overprint a semi-transparent white-to-gray blend and tone it all down.

Step 6 rollup

Step 6 printed

Yes, that's better... and I got the intermediate green in the bargain. It's always a bit of a head-scratcher when I have to think inside out about values. Before I overprinted I did, of course, carve away the areas where I wanted this green to remain, but I had to remind myself these were not the lightest bits of green.

Step 5 vs Step 6

Here's a comparison shot... I definitely think it's better this way, and worth the mental gymnastics. Next step? Another green, I think. Maybe. Probably.

Linocut in Progress: A quiet moment from home

 Alrighty, then. 

I know it's been ages since I posted anything here. Several reasons for that, but one of the biggest is that readership of blogs in this format has fallen way off and I'm uncertain what to do about it. Social media in general is such a minefield right now... especially with all of the horrors (for creators) of AI, and AI scraping of images. I'm about to go back to snail mail, honestly.

But until I decide what to do... there IS a narrative of a linocut in progress to share, although the path will be bumpy. I apparently didn't even think to take photos until I had already printed the second color pass. But even at this stage, I think North American readers will already be able to identify the subject. 

I was surprised one rainy day to look out my window and see a definitive answer to the question of what birds do when it's raining. I'm sure some seek cavities, and I've watched a few huddle from time to time under the roof of my wood shed... but on this day I found an obviously very damp chickadee huddled against the trunk of a tree.

The first big questions, before I even started, were whether or not I would suggest the actual rain and, if so, should it be represented by white or light gray lines? In the case of white or light gray lines they would need to be carved out NOW and held open for the duration of the process.

Hm. 

I looked at how Japanese printmakers handled rain... mostly with the thinnest of black or dark gray lines. 

Hm. 

Well. 

I decided not to decide, and to just plan to cut a completely separate block with which to print an overlay at the end. Would this come back and bite me in the butt? Maybe.

Reduction linocut in progress: Steps 1 and 2 printed

But here are the first two gray stages already printed, and we're moving on to Step 3. I wanted to warm up the tone a bit... this will be a balancing act that will challenge me the entire way through. Too warm? Too cool?

Step 3 rollup

Honestly, the rollup here looks rather pink... It's a problem I often struggle with when working with browns. Color temperature... what the heck.

Oh. And I suppose right off the bat I need to issue a disclaimer, apology, warning... about the quality of photography during this project. We've had a lot of gray days, and I've been working a lot in the evenings. All of which is to say that studio light is pretty awful right now, and attempts to use natural light through wintery windows is often compromised by dirty windows and weird shadows. I could wait until each stage is completely dry and then stick a print in the scanner... but who wants to wait for that? 

So we're stuck with substandard photography. Sorry.

Step 3 printed, accompanied by window dirt and shadows.

But hey... at least the brown doesn't look so pinkish on top of the gray. You knew that would happen, didn't you?

On to Step 4.

Step 4 rollup and mask

There are some lichen on the tree, which I'd like to suggest, so I mixed up a lichen-y blue green. I wanted to contain this color only in the foreground tree, so cut some newsprint masks and printed away. 

Step 4 printed

I thought this already seemed a bit dark, but I know from experience not to panic too much about value in these early stages, because once the actual dark bits start coming into play everything changes. So far, so good. Except for the photography. 

Linocut in Progress: Finishing the Scoters

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.)

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 8 rollup

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.

Step 9 rollup

As you can see, there is still a good amount of this dark color printing in the water reflections.  

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... 

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.)

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.

Pochoir technique to the rescue! (Pochoir was used frequently in the 1920s and 30s to hand color fashion plates and decorative illustrations. Read more about it at the Rhode Island School of Design website.)

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. 

Pochoir stencil detail

Yes. Exactly right. A subtle difference, but a necessary one. And now it's all finished...

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.