Linocut in Progress: An autumnal endeavor

Things ramped up considerably in the studio this past week. Multiple deadlines loom and once again I'm hearing the relentless drum beat. Gotta get it done, gotta get it done, gotta get it done.

It's not my favorite way to work, let me tell you. But it seems to happen with annoying regularity. Every few months, in fact. There are a raft of exhibition deadlines in April, and now... A stack for November.

No time to waste, so as a reminder, here's Step 1:

As I began this new linocut I remembered a promise I made to myself:  No more blended rolls on the first pass, especially on a piece that is 18" x 18." Clearly I am completely untrustworthy, since I broke that promise and did it anyway.

It was with Step 2 that technical problems appeared.

A couple of things are happening here to create uneven ink coverage. The first issue was the use of a too-small roller. I used an 8" instead of 18," because I was feeling lazy about clean up.  It's just one solid color, won't be a problem, right? 

Um, wrong. I found it really difficult to get ink evenly on the block with a too-small roller. And...

I've been struggling to get ol' Presston to set even pressure on larger pieces. I zeroed out, and zeroed out again, and still there were problems. The dark line down the middle of this print is caused by a single sheet of newsprint, placed under one side of the block in an attempt to even out the pressure. Seriously. That's how much difference one newsprint-thickness of pressure can make. 

I pulled up the collar of the adjustment dial and jammed a screwdriver into my thumb trying to get it back in place. Panic mounted as I hunted for a bandage and considered whether I would have to print all these deadline-driven pieces by hand. But finally, somehow, I got it all settled. 

Step 3. Another solid color, but this time I got out the big roller. No problems with ink coverage, and the pressure problems have been solved. You can still see the newsprint mark in this particular print, but it's less pronounced and it's going to be covered soon anyway.

And then the fun started. By fun I mean tedium. I spent large portions of three days chipping tiny chunks out of a large area of the block. Chip, chip, chip, chip through several documentaries about 1960s sitcoms, and the 50-year history of Star Trek, and the making of Star Wars. Oh, and a bunch of old Dean Martin shows. Honestly. It's all on YouTube, which is important, since I haven't had a television for several years.

Saturday night I pronounced myself ready for the next color pass and Sunday morning I mixed up two lovely colors: a sort of minty green and a pale yellow ochre. And by lovely I mean kind of questionable. The ochre will be dry grasses, the green is for aspen leaves that haven't yet turned yellow. The blended roll helps make a smooth transition between background and foreground.

And see? The green doesn't look nearly so obnoxious with the yellows under it.

Time out now for thinking... How much of this light green will remain? How will I start to approach the grasses? And what time is lunch?

Linocut in Progress: The end of the end

Sometimes the simplest things can give you the biggest problems in printmaking.

After spot-printing those funny shapes of lightest green I did a bit of carving and then printed a transparent mid-value green blended to a darker blue-green. The transparent nature of the colors meant they interacted in interesting ways with the odd color shapes below them.

There was one spot that I wasn't too excited about–it developed a harsh color line rather than a smooth transition. Also, I had masked the bird to keep the greens out of it and now it looked purple. I was happy with the variety of darks, though, and relatively sure I could fix the other issues with the next pass.

"Fleeting" reduction linocut, Step 13.

Aaannnnnd... that next pass was a straightforward transparent green-brown made from scraps of previously-printed colors. Simple. (Ahem.)

"Fleeting" reduction linocut, Step 14.

It looks fine here, but this "simple"color pass gave me a some trouble. I had to leave town for a couple of days in between this step and the previous one, which meant that the prints were too dry when I returned. As a result I didn't get good adhesion on this color pass. I ended up running the same color twice on all of the prints to get what I wanted. Ugh.

Tedious, but successful. The greens are now less bright, the hard edge I was worried about has gone away, and the bird has a little more color to it. (Not purple.)

All that was left (I thought) was the final dark for the marks on the tree trunks and some of the branches. Not quite a straight black, but close.

Unfortunately the near-black that was good for the trees was bad for the bird, so I wiped that color away from the bird before printing.

"Fleeting," reduction linocut, Step 15.

Of course now the bird felt a little bit too light. I wanted it to remain subtle... a sort of surprise for the viewer who comes close and discovers he or she is not alone in the forest... but at this stage it looked too insubstantial. So I mixed a more transparent blue-gray and tried to print only the bird by masking out the rest of the block and running it through the press.

Usually this works fine, but since the blackish color had been printed mere minutes before, the mask intended to protect the prints instead stripped the black off. (sigh) I expected some stripping*...  but not quite as much as I got. Again, so much for "simple."

(*Stripping: If you want to remove excess ink from prints, place a sheet of clean newsprint on your block, place your print face-down on the newsprint, and run the whole stack through the press. You can do this with hand-rubbed prints, too, and you don't necessarily need to include the block.)

In the end I ran the over-stripped prints back through the press to fix the dark and then carefully hand-rubbed the bird's final color on every print. Ooph.

"Fleeting," reduction linocut, Step 15.5... and final.

The difference in the bird is probably too subtle to see in a web image, although I think all of the steps on this post are embiggenable, so you might be able to tell if you click on them and view them larger.

Whew! Glad this one is finished, as it's due for a big exhibition. As is often the case, it doesn't look much like what I envisioned, but I'm still pleased with it. It was the dense tangle of many tree trunks that motivated me to chase after this image... but it was the intricacies of the background that were the most challenging.

And speaking of challenge... I just received in the post a small wooden, silver-painted block on which to create an image for Abend Gallery's 25th Anniversary Holiday Miniatures show. I'm going to try to print on it... somehow. But first I have to decide what the image is! And of course it needs to be back in Denver next week... dry enough to ship and hang. Guess what I'll be doing the next few days. No rest for the wicked weary.

Linocut in Progress: The beginning of the end

To be honest, I have reached the end, but I have delayed writing about it until now. There were a couple of stages in the development of this reduction linocut at which I thought everything might come apart. Now that I know it has been accomplished I am more comfortable with making a public spectacle of it (and myself).

"Fleeting" linocut, Step 10

So here we are at Step 10. It seems so long ago now that I barely remember what happened here, although clearly it was the darker brown. I think I used that same transparent olive green ink again... possibly with a little more brown added to it.

I do that a lot: build a new color from the leftovers of the color before. I find it gives a cohesiveness to the overall color palette and it saves me from wasting too much ink. Sometimes when I'm trying to find the right color I end up with a much bigger pile of ink than I need. Usually I'll scrape that extra ink on to a sheet of wax paper and fold it up for reuse later. Oil-based inks will last a surprisingly long time this way, sometimes even a couple of weeks, depending on the pigment and what modifiers I've used.

But I digress. Step 11 was so quick as to almost not count. Remember that I mentioned there is a surprise in this image? Here it is:

Surprise! It's a bird! Step 11 detail

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's really a bird. Zipping through our aspen grove is a little hawk. Don't blink, you might miss it.

The gray ink was applied with a small roller, and I carefully wiped the excess from around it. I could have used a stencil here, but it wasn't too much effort to just keep the area clean by hand.

And here's where things got dodgy. The image is very "flat" at this stage and I wanted to suggest a little bit of light. I also wanted to suggest that this grove sits in front of evergreen trees. Sounded like some green was in order. But I didn't want to put a light green over everything, so I inked some selected areas and applied a mask before printing. Like this:

What this doesn't show is that I realized partway through that there was another area that needed some of this green, so had to recut the masks. But this gives you the idea. The newsprint mask protects the print from the un-inked areas of the block, which can pull up previous ink layers or cause other sorts of mayhem as the block goes through the press.

And here was the result, also before I realized I needed a little green elsewhere:

"Fleeting" reduction linocut, Step 12

 Kind of scary-looking, isn't it? Which is why it seems like a good place to stop for today!

Linocut in Progress: The vagaries of transparent color

I've mentioned a few times that I've been using a transparent lilac ink in this piece... which might seem odd, given that there's not really any lilac showing. For the next step I took the leftover lilac ink from the previous print pass, added some blue and some black to make it darker and cooler, and printed this:

"Fleeting," reduction linocut, Step 8

It still looked decidedly pink, although if you isolate some of the background you can see that it does have a violet tinge.

Hm.

I wanted some of these trunks to "read" purple-y, and I wasn't sure that I had it right. But I was also starting to worry that everything was getting a little too dark too fast to risk another pass of the lavender ink. Enter blind faith. I decided to leave it as it was and move on.

I intended for the next color to read as a soft brown, but my first attempt was frightening. Straight transparent brown over the lilac just read as... red! Not what I wanted. I tried adding a little black. Better, but still not right. Ack!

And then I calmed down and engaged some basic color theory. The current color layers are all warm– building slowly from yellow to orange to the lilac. Which means that every pass is gaining a bit more red (even though I haven't touched any red ink.) How does one "gray down" red? By adding the complement, which, for those of you who haven't thought about color mixing since kindergarten, is the color opposite red on the color wheel. Green!

So I added green to my existing ink color until I got this lovely olive tone, still very transparent.

 No, really. It's lovely!

Fingers crossed, I pulled another print... and, voila!

"Fleeting," reduction linocut, Step 9

 It's brown! AND, even better, the trunks that were intended to read as purple, DO! This particular shot is embiggenable, so I encourage you to click on it and see what I mean.

From here the temptation is to just barrel on ahead and get those background darks placed, but there's a secret little surprise in this image that's going to require me to digress for a few steps. It's going to increase my ink count, but only in a tiny portion of the print. Curious? Me, too. Fingers crossed I can make it work.

Linocut in Progress: Can't see the forest for the... um.. incompleteness?

Slowly, slowly the aspen forest emerges.

"Fleeting" reduction linocut, Step 5

There are many more tree trunks in this image, but this is reduction printing and I have to think not only about color but also about transparency. I really want the leaves to hold most of the brightness, so it was time for a medium yellow.

But of course I want some luminosity in the trunks, also, so it's a bit of a dance.

Some of the leaves are in shadow, so a darker gold came next.

"Fleeting" reduction linocut, Step 6

Okay. That's fairly satisfying, but now it's time to go back to the trunks. There are some in the distance which are more brown, and others that are more lavender. Time to spread some more of Jennifer's favorite council house lilac around. ;-)

"Fleeting" reduction linocut, Step 7

It looks rather pink here, but I think (I hope) that when I put the next color down I'll be able to swing it a little more purple-y. I don't hate this color, in fact I think it will work for the lighter bits of the more brown tree trunks, so that's what I will carve for next.

The block itself is getting visually confusing. It's hard to remember where I'm headed next.

I don't think there's a lot of carving for this next stage, so hoping to get at least two more colors down this weekend.

Welcome to "What's It All About Wednesday"!

"Early Snow - Ponderosa Pine"
reduction linocut, 18 x 12 inches

Or maybe I should call it "Why'd You Do That Wednesday." Either way, get ready for a little side trip down memory lane on Wednesdays in 2015. (Not every Wednesday, mind you. But some.)

For me the most important part of an image can be the story behind it. My work is frequently inspired by experiences I've had while hiking or camping or just hanging out along the river. I like to imagine the "whys" of observed animal behavior, or the "what happened here" of a newly-fallen tree or other anomaly on my regular walk.

But this particular linocut started with an idea and became a quest to create some larger images of iconic western trees. "Early Snow - Ponderosa Pine" was the fourth in the tree portrait series.

The funny thing about these tree portraits is the length of time it can take to find "the" representative tree for each one. Take this one, for example. I had in mind an image of the quintessential ponderosa pine: solitary, tall, and graceful with an arched crown. Such trees are everywhere, right?

HA! Not once you start looking for them. Our forests are full of ponderosa pines, but until I started looking for the "perfect" tree I didn't realize how few of them fit my stereotype. Many of our local pondos don't have the arched crown, or their crowns are broken, or they are part of a dense group and the character of the individual tree is hard to discern.

Worse yet, the "best" trees were often frustratingly out of range for me in my little, not-particularly-practical-for-mountain-living car.

The Quest for the Perfect Trees expanded to include a couple of friends, one of whom kept his eye out for weeks and then sportingly took me on a couple of four-wheel-drive expeditions to visit potential candidates. I am sure I heard triumphant music when this particular tree emerged from the gray of a light snowfall and seemed to say "you looking for me?"

Fieldwork Friday: From the archives

Thirty-six hours. Maybe less. In just a day and a half I expect to be settling down finally into one location and happily living with my work again. I have big plans for Sunday morning that involve ink and pajamas. Which, now that I think of it, probably sounds a wee bit strange. But hopefully long-time readers will be able to explain it to newcomers in a way that doesn't make me sound too eccentric.

ANYWAY. Since I don't have new lino work to share (although I do have a block all drawn up and ready to go!) I thought I'd get Mr. Peabody to fire up the Wayback Machine and see what we could see.

So here's an old sketchbook scan dated 2003. This is a fabulous ponderosa pine living and growing in Chubb Park, a lovely area at the eastern edge of our small county. At least I presume it's still living and growing there ten-plus years later. I need to go look for it again.

I dubbed this "the donut tree," for obvious reasons. Its mysterious growth pattern seems a fitting metaphor for my own journey of the past several months. Got a little twisted around, but now it's onward and upward again!