Linocut in Progress: The end, and what came after

Alrighty, then. It's time to print the strange leaf concept: Darker at the top of the image, a wee bit lighter towards the bottom. I have imagined that the last light on the horizon would allow a little more color in the lower section of the image than it would against the darker sky. Getting too crazy about it could detract from the overall quiet mood, however, so it required a delicate touch.

So, hey! Why not a gray-to-pukey-bond-paper-green blend? That seems reasonable. (Snort)

Step 9 rollup

Because I wanted the light green to hold up against the already-printed darker tone, I needed it to be a bit more opaque than the gray. To that end I pulled out a green with some white in it that I had mixed for the earlier flower print. It was entirely too opaque as it was, so it took a couple of tries to get the right balance of transparency vs. coverage. I wanted the printed color to read lighter but not obnoxiously so.

Step 9 printed

I used the same mask that I cut for the previous step to keep the gray-to-green ink out of the tree trunk, branch, and owl. Well, it was mostly the same mask. I modified it to allow a little of the dark color in to the upper portion of the owl's head. (Read: I chopped off a chunk.)

I hoped that doing so would accomplish a couple of things: 1) Soften the transition between the top of the owl's head and the leaves behind it, 2) put a little base color into the pupils of the owl's eyes so the next color would adhere nicely, and 3) give me an idea of just how dark the last (I hoped) pass should be.

I was more or less satisfied with the leaves at this point, but wanted a few of them to get one more hit of subtle dark when the last pass was printed. The final carving stage defined the darkest overall color in tree, bird, and leaves.

The Step 10 ink was a solid transparent dark, made by adding some blue and brown to the leftover transparent gray from the previous pass. Et voila!

"Watching and Waiting" reduction linocut, 18" x 18"
© Sherrie York • www.sherrieyork.com

And now it's time for a confession. 

Printmaker readers are probably aware that the first few prints in a run tend to be a bit light. It takes a while for a nice ink base to build up on the block, so I always consider the first sheets as "testers." (In my commercial printshop days we called it "makeready.")

But this time the first color pass didn't settle out as dark as I thought I wanted. I panicked, and in the middle of that very first color run I adjusted the inks to a richer blend. Once the second half of the run was finished, I planned to go back and hit the first prints with a second layer to make them all match.

However. Once I printed the remaining sheets I wasn't sure I was going to like the more color-saturated version. Should I proceed with the plan to reprint the first prints, or should I let myself take an experimental approach, even with the huge deadline looming?

I took a deep breath and opted to continue with two different versions.

Because I work with so much transparent ink, the first color pass affected every subsequent color pass, and I ended up with two small editions instead of one big one. Here's the more color-rich version:

"Watching and Waiting" reduction linocut, 18" x 18"
Version 2
© Sherrie York • www.sherrieyork.com

I ended up with 9 prints like this, and 12 of the first version. I'll title both editions the same, and distinguish them with V1 and V2, or something like that.

But here's the kicker: I can only present one edition or the other at the exhibition for which this image is intended. Which to choose? What do you think?

Linocut in Progress: The eyes have it

By now it should be clear that this linocut features an owl and a tree, and that night is falling. The theme is established, but it's time to work out some of the details. The eyes. It's time to do something about the eyes.

Great horned owls (for that is the species in question) have yellow irises, but of course I don't want them to be glow-in-the-dark yellow. I also don't have any desire to run the entire block through the press two dozen times for these small shapes. Time to employ some "pochoir," or stenciling technique.

The use of pochoir was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, frequently as a method for hand coloring prints. Back then the medium of choice was usually gouache, not printing ink, but hey! It's the 21st century now.

I mixed a small batch of a yellowy, slightly transparent ink and cut a small eye-shaped stencil from a piece of transparent mylar. It's hard to see the stencil itself in the photo, but here it is in place, with one eye "pounced" directly on to the print and the other eye still to be done.

Googly eyes in pochoir.

It's a technique that goes fairly quickly when there's such a small area to cover. Once the pupils are printed even less of this color will show, but the result so far? Creepy-eyed zombie owl.

Step 7 printed: Creepy-eyed owl

Now it's time to pay attention to the leaves on the tree. Green, most likely, but not too bright. It is dusk, after all.

Since I don't need this green to be everywhere on the image, some rough inking around the owl should be sufficient. Like this:

Selective inking for Step 8

Of course I don't want my sloppy green to influence the owl or the trunk of the tree, soooooo....guess what? Another mask! This one covers any "overrun" of ink and it protects the prints from the un-inked areas of the block when I run them through the press. The green looks bright on the block, but it's quite transparent and it will be influenced a great deal by the brown already printed.

Step 8 mask

Step 8 printed

Okay, then. I'm not completely sold on the leaves, they are a little too "flat" for my liking, printed all one color like this. Naturally this means I'm going to complicate things for myself one more time.

I'd like some of the lower leaves to have a slightly lighter tone added, and the upper leaves to have a darker tone added. And I'd like to do it all in one pass if I can. It should be an interesting (read: confusing) carving exercise, since it means this color will serve as the mid-tone. Some of the shapes I leave behind will print lighter and some will print darker. Ooh. I'm giving myself a headache already.

Linocut in Progress: The owl emerges

As I mentioned in the first post about this current linocut, I waited until I felt semi-confident the piece would work before I started posting about it. And guess what? The next two stages were the point at which I decided it was safe to go public.

Steps 5 and 6 were mostly about carving. And carving. And carving. There are lots of details in the tree trunk and the feathers of the bird, I'd say 4 or 5 Star Trek (TNG) episodes worth of carving for each step.

"Night Watch," (Changing my mind about the title)
Reduction linocut, Step 5

Here you can see some of the trunk detail start to emerge, as well as some of the feather details in the bird, mostly around the face. Apparently I didn't take a photo of the ink rollup for either of these steps, but 5 was a transparent brown, and 6 was a transparent blue-black.

Reduction linocut, Step 6

The biggest surprise at this point? I think I might finish this in just 10 passes. That hasn't happened in ages! The advantage of trying to imagine a low light situation is that it's keeping me from going overboard with color subtleties. There will be some dark greens in the leaves, another dark in the tree and bird... and of course those yellow eyes need to be addressed. I didn't do them earlier in the process because getting the tone right will be a function of all the color around them.

But optimism has arrived. The next few days will tell me if it's justified. ;-)

Linocut in Progress: In which things get even weirder

Two steps and a half dozen colors into this print I was sure it was going to be a spectacular disaster. For Step 3 I did a huge amount of carving, including removing large chunks of the background. Now and forever: Gone.

Which is, of course, why I did this crazy rollup:

Night Watch reduction linocut, Step 3

Yep. That's a bunch of straight-up opaque white with a blob of transparent purple in the middle. It's what you would have done, isn't it?

Of course the white wouldn't look white and the purple wouldn't look purple once printed...

Step 3 printed

Yeah. More weird.

But at least I now had a sense of the overall image and could start thinking about more relative color and tone. Most of the gray created by the white ink will be covered in subsequent passes, but it's good to have it for a few of the "brightest" areas of the tree.

Step 4 involved some carving in the tree and quite a bit more carving in the owl. I wanted to warm things up just a bit so I mooshed together a bunch of ink scraps from the previous print and came up with a sort of dark ochre, middling transparent.

Step 4 rollup

Yeah, no reason anything should go wrong here, either. (Rolls eyes)

Step 4 printed

Huh. Whaddaya know? First glimmers of hope appear. I might actually pull this off. Maybe. Possibly. 

Linocut in Progress: The Night Watch Begins

Despite my lack of blog posts, I HAVE been working on another large linocut. It feels like a bit of a tightrope act, though, so I've been reluctant to put it out in the blogosphere before I was sure I had a handle on it.

I'm still not sure. I told someone the other day that what I'm doing is sort of like inviting a bunch of people to a big dinner party, and then deciding to serve a dish I've never made before, with unfamiliar ingredients.

And did I mention the party starts in an hour?

Let me 'splain.

From somewhere in my rather questionable brain the idea of a night scene emerged. Not a sunset behind silhouetted foreground shapes, but a scene with a dramatically dark background and a discernible subject in very low light conditions. Not full dark. Maybe sort of dawnish or duskish.

The trick is that the reference I'm using was gathered in the smack-dab middle of the day. High contrast. Lots of bright areas. Converting it to a night scene? Must be out of my mind.

Which is why I started like this:

Night Watch reduction linocut, Step 1

Yeah. Purple-blue-yellow blend. Make sense to you? Me, neither. But that's what I did.

Joking aside, there was a real reason I did this. Two of them, in fact. 1) I wanted a nice, clean yellowish color across the bottom of an image that will be dominated by blue tones and 2) the main subject of my image contains a good bit of white. But of course I can't make my whites WHITE in this imagined scene. Blue should do it, but trying to nail this hue and value in the very first pass was a bit stressful.

Once all these lovely blended squares were printed I started to do some carving of my subject... taking out those "white" shapes. Halfway through that effort I realized it was premature. What I REALLY needed to do next was to print a really dark blue into the upper portion of the background.

Like this:

Step 2 rollup

Ooh.. purdy. The dark blended to nothing towards the bottom because I wanted to preserve the already-printed yellow.

Of course this was too dark to put in the body of my subject, so I cut a little mask...

Gee... what's in gonna be?

Way less complicated than any of the masks I used last time around, eh?

Step 2 printed

Probably you can already guess what the subject will be, but so far it seems...weird. Just...weird. Stay tuned.

Something for the "Yay Jar"

The "Yay Jar," celebration reminders for year's end.

As always, the Birds in Art opening weekend at the Woodson Art Museum was filled with great art, good friends and colleagues, and way too little sleep. (When I finally made it home and in to bed I slept 13.5 hours!)

There's always a little let-down when the magic is over and it's time to face the reality of deadlines and paperwork (and studio time, of course). But if I'm lucky I might get another bit of news to celebrate in the week following the opening. This year I did, in fact, get two: "It's April, No Foolin'" was selected for the 2016-17 national tour and a private collector will purchase it.

Things for the Yay Jar, absolutely. You don't know what a Yay Jar is? Here's mine... a former pasta sauce container repurposed as a place to collect happy news and milestones throughout the year.

 In December when I'm planning for the upcoming year it's all too easy to dwell on the things I didn't get done. So... I empty the Yay Jar, read its contents, and remind myself that I did manage accomplish a thing or two in the previous 12 months. (It seems like I got off to a good start this year, as there's something peeking out that's marked January 1. I don't remember what it was.)

Obligatory artist-standing-next-to-their-work photo from Birds in Art

Another bit of fun while I was in Wisconsin was the discovery that my piece is playing a part in the museum's Art Park interactive area for children and families. A half dozen pieces from the show were replicated as relief blocks (how appropriate!) from which kids can make rubbings and then color their own masterpieces.

A familiar little owl at the rubbing station in Art Park

Of course it's a good thing that I got those 13+ hours of sleep at the beginning of the week, because since my return I've been up to my elbows in lino crumbs and ink. I've got three colors down on a new large-ish (18 x 18 inches) linocut, but at the moment all I can show you is the first stage. After that last snow scene I had to psych myself up to print blue again, but thankfully this is the only blue pass for this piece. Stay tuned!

What's it gonna be? Step 1 of a new reduction linocut

Birds in Art 2016

Ahhh... the best time of year is upon us! No, I'm not talking about cooler days, autumn color, or unending zucchini harvest. It's time for Birds in Art!

This coming weekend I'll be traveling to Wisconsin for the opening of the 41st Birds in Art exhibition at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum.  Great art, great venue, great friends, great staff!

The weather forecast, however, seems a bit... damp. That's okay, my grumpy little owl will be perfectly happy to be part of this amazing exhibition, which runs September 10 - November 27. ("At least it's not snowing," says he.)

If you're in central Wisconsin this autumn, I encourage you to take the time to visit!

"It's April - No Foolin'" reduction linocut, 18" x 12"

Linocut in Progress: Finishing the owl

Wahoo! (Or perhaps that should be wa-WHOOO, given that this is an owl...) Either way, it's finished before the new year, and that makes me a happy camper.

The final stages were all fairly subtle: more transparent gray layers!

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 9

It was getting so close here, but I wanted to give a little more emphasis to the foreground branches and the bird...soooo.....

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 10

I really thought that this would be the end, but the owl felt a tiny bit flat to me. I cleared out the branches immediately around the owl and also took some material out of the bird's back and wing, then inked up the owl only and did one last run of transparent gray.

Reduction linocut, Step 11, final

Taking a decent photo of this image is, as I feared it might be, really challenging. The camera wants to make everything more contrasty-y than it actually is and either too warm or too cool. This shot is close, but not perfect.

Now what it needs is a title. This little owl appeared in a tree next to a restaurant in downtown Salida in early May. Flammulated owls are creatures of coniferous forest (which we have all around us, but not in town), but they are secretive. Its blatant presence in the middle of the day was quite a surprise.

The day was overcast and gray. As I worked on this piece I imagined this little fellow out for a spring stretch and, confused by the overcast light, caught away from his usual perch as the day progressed.

I don't remember if it snowed later that day or not, but it wouldn't have been unusual. The non-feathered bipeds in the area, anxious for warmer days, might have responded to those tentative flakes with a grumble: "Not again," or, "Enough with the snow already!"

I'm not sure that a viewer would understand the reference if I called this piece, "Not again," so I'm still looking for a title. Suggestions, anyone?

Linocut in Progress: Just a little color

Linocut in progress, Step 6

It's a good thing I made a big pile of transparent gray early in this process, since it saves me time both in thinking and in mixing new color. I added the tiniest bit of blue at this stage, and the printing was quite straightforward.

But for the next step all that changed. These branches sport leaf buds in an early spring stage: Still rusty red, although a few are starting to open. There's also a little "flame" to be added to the wing of the flammulated owl (Psiloscops flammeolus). Two slightly different colors, but they can be printed in one pass with spot inking.

Spot inking. Sorry it's upside down. The light was better from this direction.

Spot inking is a lovely approach when one only needs color in small areas, but it does pose some interesting challenges sometimes. 

All of these color areas are small and much of the un-inked block will come in contact with the prints. I've shown the disastrous consequences of this before, but if you missed it just know that whole layers can be pulled off of slightly tacky prints with a dry block. 

Soooooooo.... Time for another ridiculous mask.

Overkill?

It took a good chunk of the morning to cut multiple masks like this one, but once I had it ready to go the printing itself went smoothly.

Linocut in progress, Step 7 (2 colors)

It looks a little clunky here... the rusty color in the owl's wing looks particularly harsh. Time to whip out that transparent gray. Again.

Linocut in progress, Step 8

I love this pass. So much has happened with another transparent gray. The leaf buds are now two colors of rusty red, but I didn't mix another red! The owl is darker and the branches have a little more depth. The orangey color in the bird's wing is still a little harsh, but with one or two more gray passes I think it will fall back nicely.

Feeling pretty good about this now... methinks it will be done before the new year!

Linocut in Progress: The owl emerges. Kinda.

Linocut in progress, Step 5

On the previous pass I warmed the image with a light transparent brown, and now I'm trying to subtly swing the whole piece back the other way. This pass was a transparent gray... just straight-up black in a big pile of transparent base.

It still looks quite brown, but except for the details of the leaf buds and some rusty bits in the owl I think everything from here on out will be layers of transparent gray. I might try sticking a hint of blue in it, but not much. I want the overall mood to remain overcast and quiet.

Linocut in Progress: Small beginning steps, and then a big leap!

It's amazing how long I can avoid committing to a new linocut when I don't have a deadline looming. Ridiculous, really, since I am totally happy to be working once I begin. But becoming brave enough to make that first cut can sometimes take a while.

I wish I could remember who it was who said, "I begin when the pain of NOT working becomes greater than the pain of working." (Or some words to that effect.) I tried to Google it but just got a bunch of references to ibuprofen and morphine. Draw your own connections if you wish.

Sure enough... the pain of not working hit me last week, but I haven't made any posts because the first couple of passes didn't really show much. And, to be honest, I wasn't sure my idea was even going to work. But now I'm four passes along and fairly confident that I'm headed in the right direction, so....

Step 1:

Detail, first step of new linocut

See? I told you there wasn't much to show. But this is the reason I paced along the edge of the cliff for so long. The first marks are random white dots in a pale gray background. These dots will be there now for the entire print. Geez, I hope this works.

Step 2:

I carved a few more random dots and printed a slightly darker gray. I'm not sure now that the first gray was dark enough to make a difference, but okay... onward.

If you have a bright monitor you might be able to see the outlines of the subject. On a few of the prints in the run I had some bleed out from the Sharpie marker with which I drew the image on the block. I'm not worried about it because this will all get covered in subsequent steps, and the worst offenders get rotated to the front of the line as "test" prints.

Step 3: 

I decided that I didn't like the flat gray background, so added a slightly darker gray-blending-to-nothing in the top half of the print. This is a wretched photo! The bottom of the print is NOT blue, it's all gray. Which you'll see a little better in.....

Step 4:

NOW we are getting somewhere. The bones of the entire image are now in place... which for me is pretty surprising after only 4 color passes. At the moment I think the white dots might read a little bit like stars until one realizes that some of them are in the foreground.. carved in front of branches and bird. It's the beginning of a snow storm! Just the first few flakes.

I was afraid of putting in too many snowflakes, but now I think I should have done a few more. Oh well, next time!

It was kind of a scary commitment for me to remove so much material from the block at this point, but it was a great opportunity to fall in love with the widest "sweep" gouge in my new Pfeil tool set. I am really, really happy with these new gouges. There are a couple that will take time to find regular use for, but so far I am smitten with 4 of the 6 in the "B" set.

There will be a pause of a couple of days now: Friday to deliver work to an exhibition and Saturday to chase around for our annual Christmas Bird Count. But I should be back to work on Sunday and... fingers crossed... I am hopeful that I can wrap this one up before the end of the year!