Roll(er) in the New Year!

The studio is tidy, the recycling has been taken to the recycling center. The Yay Jar has been emptied and it's ready for all the good things to come. It must be a new year!

As my first act of 2017... I took a walk.

The Arkansas River, between Sands and Frantz Lakes, looking to the
Sawatch Range and the Continental Divide.

I had extra motivation for getting out early. Since mid-December our little Sands Lake State Wildlife Area has been hosting an extremely rare bird for these parts: long-tailed duck.

Handsome visitor, a male long-tailed duck

The long-tail is a sea duck, typically spending its winters in protected bays of the Atlantic coast. That's a long way from Colorado, and while it's not unknown for one to turn up occasionally on the big reservoirs of the eastern plains, a mountain bird gets a lot of folks' knickers in a twist. Luckily he stuck around for our Christmas Bird Count (December 17), and for the last few days I've been crossing my fingers extra-hard that he'd stay here until the new year. Hoorah! He did!

I've been a bit obsessed with this guy... he's so darn beautiful. He's been hard to photograph, partly because he tends to stay beyond the reach of my camera lens and partly because he's just so busy all the time. He probably spends as much time below the surface of the water as he does above it.

But I've got a few ideas for linocuts that I'd like to pursue, and now I can't decide if the subject of my next print should be the merganser idea I've been itching to start or Mr. Handsome Long-tail. Art world problems.

Since I'm stymied by indecision, I took time in the last few days of 2016 to make a small lino of my friend Sue's pug, Pipsi. These days Pipsi is a mature dog of many talents, but this print takes us back to her puppy days.

I've also got a little cat image drawn up and ready to go, so I can waffle about a larger piece for a few more days.

"Pipsi," reduction linocut, 5" x 5"

Whatever I decide to do next will have to wait until the end of the week, however. Tomorrow I'm off to Denver for the opening of the Coors Western Art Show. It will be a whirlwind couple of days, since I have to get back right away to get ready to leave again next week, but I'm looking forward to catching up with colleagues and collectors at this amazing event.

My work will be in the Club portion of the show, which means that after the opening it will be moved to the gallery at the National Western Club. Although the Club is "members only," you can still get in to see the work if you're visiting the National Western Stock Show January 7-22. Just ask at the Coors Show gallery and they'll let you visit as a guest.

My 2017 is roll(er)ing off to a fast start! Thank you for being part of the adventure, I hope the new year is a great one for all of us.

Rosebud, Part II: More Cuteness. Can't help it.

Little Rosebud is the devoted companion of a good friend who moved away this past summer. I miss both of their smiling faces around here, so it was delightful to work on this demonstration piece and think about them as I did so.

No demo would be complete without a scary "ugly duckling" stage, and while this isn't the worst one I've had to contend with, it was hard to give up work on Rosebud's face to put in a background color.

I briefly considered doing something flashy for the background... maybe a blended roll... maybe two. However, you and I both know that if I started down that path I ran the risk of making this too complicated and less effective as a clear example of reduction printing. Restraint was difficult, but I managed it. Somehow.

Rosebud reduction linocut, Step 5

Blue. Just plain old blue for the background. Step 5.

Of course I wanted to jazz things up at least a little, so for Step 6....

Rosebud, Step 6

I left a border, but let Rosebud break up the boundary with her lovely doggy shoulders and some of her tousled, furry head. Subject-breaking-a-border is a design element that I've always liked for adding a little more dimension and presence to a simple piece.

Almost finished now. One more dark. I think.

Rosebud, Step 7

Geez, is that cute, or what?

I thought about calling it finished at this point, but decided that a little touch of color would be fun.

Rosebud, Step 8. Finished?

There was, however, a minor complication to this decision. I couldn't carve anything more out of the block, because Step 7 is the one I'm going to print at the demonstration*. (I pulled out one print at Step 6 to save for this purpose.)

The most logical thing to do would be to wait until after the demo, when I could carve away all the material around the collar shape and have a nice, straightforward print step. But, nooooooooo. Impatient Sherrie wanted to put this color on all of the other prints in the edition now.

Of course this means using a mask, but the shape is too small and fussy to make an accurate one. Instead I cut one that was only "approximate" to protect the rest of the image and spent time carefully wiping extraneous color out of areas of the block that the mask didn't cover.

The funny thing is that once the red was printed I was no longer sure that the Step 7 dark was dark enough. But, again, I have to leave the block at Step 7 until after the demo, so this decision will have to wait until next week.

I had so much fun with Rosebud that I'm thinking about doing a few more furry pets in a small format like this. There's a big, complex image in my not-too-distant future, but it could be a nice change of pace to make a few more prints like this one.

Until then, I've left one little Rosebud print pinned to the studio wall, where her silly cuteness makes me smile every time I look at her.

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* Artist Talk and demo: Saturday, December 10 at Ann Korologos Gallery in Basalt, Colorado.

Can a demo be cute?

Darn right it can. This one will be.

I've been preparing for my Artist Talk and demo at Ann Korologos Gallery this coming Saturday.

To help visitors understand the reduction linocut process, I like to have a print mostly finished before I arrive at a hands-on presentation like this. For these destined-to-be-a-demo pieces I also pull out one print at each color pass so people can actually handle them and compare the changes.

For a demo it can be helpful to present a simple image, maybe 4 or 5 colors, but you know me. The fact that I've kept it under 10 is some sort of minor miracle.

The final reveal will, of course, be saved for another post, but here are the first steps of "Rosebud." (It's not what you think.)

Rosebud linocut, Step 1

This is a very small piece, just 5 x 6.5 inches, so it went very quickly. Not quite three days, start to finish. Well, finished enough. Here we have a nice light blue and some odd white shapes for the first step. Any guesses yet?

Don't worry, it will actually be fairly obvious by Step 2:

Rosebud, Step 2

Something furry with a button nose, apparently. This ink was a transparent gray.

Rosebud, Step 3

And another transparent gray for Step 3. At this point, however, I decided I wanted to lighten things in the hairs of our subject's chinny chin chin. It's as good a reason as any to have an example of selective inking and masking to show visitors, right?

Rosebud, Step 4

I masked the area below the mouth and printed a slightly warmer white. It looks clunky, but a lot of it will be covered up by subsequent color passes.

At this point the strangest thing started to happen. I started giggling as I worked. A small piece, a small edition, no pressure? After the last few intense months it was a joy to just play around, and who can't smile at this subject? (And believe it or not, it's already half finished at this point.)

Stay tuned for Rosebud, Part II.