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. 

Linocut in Progress: Zoom Out!

After fussing about with the little shapes of bright color in the birds' beaks for a couple of days, it was time to zoom back out and start tying things together across the entire image. There's more work to be done in the water before I can tackle the final details of the birds, and it's an interesting challenge to try to balance the values.

Here's the Step 6 ink rollup, a nice blue-green-gray. (Yes, that's the technical name for this color.)

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 6 rollup

(I do love when I get to use my nice 8" Takach roller, rather than muck about with little 1" brayers.)

And here's the print at this stage:

Step 6 printed

Okay. This seems to be more or less on track, although I know that at this point I really started agonizing over how dark to make some of the shapes in the water. Directly below the birds they will be reflecting some of the black of the birds' bodies... but I don't want those shapes to draw too much attention and look like they are just cut out and slapped on. 

All of which is to say that I'm at the thinking-takes-as-much-or-more-time-than-the actual-doing stage of this linocut.

What I apparently thought (according to the next photos in the chronology) was that the whole thing could use another dark.

Step 7 rollup

What I ALSO thought was that the tips of the birds' beaks still needed one more tiny bit of light color on them, but I didn't want to cut another mask and set up a whole color run just to make three tiny shapes. Instead I inked the entire block, and then used a shop towel to wipe the color off the beaks before printing.

 Did it take more or less time than cutting a mask and making a color pass for these tiny shapes? Probably six of one, half a dozen of the other. But the chances are greater for the registration to slip when there's only a tiny bit of ink on the block, so this seemed like the best solution while I thought about how to deal with these little shapes.

And after printing they looked like this:

Step 7 printed

Is the water mostly done now? Hm. Not quite, I don't think. And At this stage I realized I had been neglecting the issue of the one female bird in the image, who looks significantly different from her escorts. That situation will need to be addressed, stat.

Linocut in Progress: It's the little things

Well, I dropped the ball on narrating the progress of the scoter linocut, so let's see if I can reconstruct the steps based on photos.

For Step 4 I needed to do some spot inking to get the crazy color of the male birds' beaks going, plus small bits that will be reflected in the water. The best way to contain this was to cut some newsprint masks.

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 4 mask

Masks cut... time to roll out some ink! For those who might not be familiar with Atlantic sea ducks, these are Surf Scoters– another species invented for printmakers, because the beaks of the male birds are just ridiculously colorful. 

Or maybe that's just colorful and ridiculous.

Step 4 rollup

Here is the ink roll-up. A bright orange, applied selectively and then isolated by the newsprint mask before printing. The mask shapes, by the way, are cut a little oversized in areas where I know the final image shapes will be defined by the darker colors to come. Anyone who worked as a graphic designer in the pre-computer paste-up era will recognize this as "trapping." Rather than risk an unwanted white space if registration gets a wee bit out of whack in the next layers, one prints shapes a tiny bit larger so the subsequent layers will neatly overlap. 

I don't think I explained that very well. Stand by to see the print of this step and maybe it will make more sense. Here's the mask in place over the inked block, ready for printing.

Step 4 mask in place

And here's the print. Can you see how the orange shapes overlap the previous blue at the top edges of the birds' beaks? This overlapping area will ultimately be overprinted with a really dark color, creating a clean line around the top of the beak and avoiding a white gap that might occur if I had tried to just print the orange to butt up to the darker shapes. You'll see. I promise.

Step 4 printed

But of course this bright orange isn't the only outrageous color in the beak of a male Surf Scoter. Look at THIS!

Step 5 rollup

I did a wee bit of carving, rolled up this red, and again used a mask to contain the color for printing.

Step 5 printed

These are certainly birds with distinctive schnozes. But it's time to move on from these little bits of color and get some value contrast going. Stay tuned!

Linocut in Progress: Back to work

Things have been quiet here at Brush and Baren– less so in life outside the blogosphere. I've got a piece in progress, but The Season is coming up rapidly here in Maine and suddenly there are a lot of details needing attention away from the studio.

But let's see what's been going on in between the more "administrative" parts of an artist's life. (Read: framing, packing, shipping, submitting show entries, writing exhibition statements, organizing PR images, delivering work, updating websites... and all that...)

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 1 rollup and tiny masks

I was excited that the first step of this new print only required a few minutes of carving and some little, bitty masks to keep color out of select areas. Should take no time at all to get this thing going, right?

Right?

Hm. Perhaps I shouldn't have started on a Monday, because sheesh! It took me a ridiculously long time to get the press pressure set correctly. Something that typically takes me about ten minutes took almost TWO HOURS! Why was this so difficult? No idea. Too tight... too loose... uneven... around and around I went. Mystified and increasingly annoyed. 

But I finally got it settled and rolled up some ink. I wanted to start with a blended roll... which I know from past experience can be tricky to print as a first color pass. But, hey! It will be fine this time.

I mixed a soft gray-into-blue blend, carefully placed the tiny little newsprint masks on top of the inked block, and started printing. Badly. The prints were streaky rather than blended, so after a couple of tries I decided I would be better off starting with a straight, flat color pass, so I cleaned everything up and started again.

I thought it was all going much better, but after I had pulled five more prints I realized I had been putting the masks IN THE WRONG PLACE on the block. What. The. (Insert your favorite expletive here.)

The temptation to just clean it all up and walk away for the day was pretty strong, but I took a deep breath and a quick lunch break, prepped some fresh sheets of paper, and started again. This time it all went more smoothly. Whew. The hardest square of blue I ever printed. It took almost all day just to get 28 sheets of paper on to the drying rack! Those seven (eight?) initial disasters are now the "testers," which I use as the first prints through the press on all subsequent color passes. I never have so many, especially not after the first color pass! Ridiculous.

 Reduction linocut in process. Step 1 printed. Finally.

There was a good bit of carving to do after this, but it went reasonably quickly and I was able to roll up that gray-to-blue blend for the second color pass. 

Step 2 rollup

I used masks of the same shape (you can probably tell that I am using them to save some white in bird beaks) and was able to get Step 2 finished with minimal aggravation.

Whew! I think we're finally moving in the right direction. Keen birders might even recognize the bird species represented. (And if you do, you will know why I am trying to keep those beak shapes clean.)

Step 2 printed

Step 3 rollup

Step 3 was more of the same... although with a rather long period of carving first. Again I rolled up a gray-to-blue blend, although this time I changed the temperature of the gray to something a bit cooler... maybe even leaning towards greenish. Because why not? 

Step 3 printed

The color in this photo is washed out... but the composition is now quite clear. Four birds... one of which has not required me to (ahem) keep its nose clean. It's also quite clear that these same bird noses (yes, yes... they are beaks or bills, not noses, I know) are rather stout. What do you suppose these are going to be? 

I think we will address that topic in the next post. Be prepared for some fiddly bits!

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.