Books Reduction Lino Print - Oranges

The first colours of this print are all the highlights for the final product, so they are looking very very neon right now! The first is an orange that will (should, anyway) add the nice gold tones of the books:

Then comes a red-orange for a few more highlights. This colour did not print very well at all. I ended up printing it twice. There's probably a big rule against doing that somewhere, but it just wouldn't work the way it was! As it turns out, the registration was perfect and I had no problems printing this colour a second time. So, go me! I'm not only quite pleased about that, but it makes me pretty hopeful that the rest of a colours will continue to print where they should. So far, I'm four colours in and still haven't ruined a single print with bad registration. This is sort of unusual for me. If this keeps up I'll be able to be extra-picky about which prints I keep in the end, and that makes me very happy.

I'm going to give one of these away when I'm finished, leave a comment in any (or all) of the related posts. Each one gets an entry.

Books Reduction Lino Print - First Colours and Contest

 I'm starting out with seventeen prints on this one! I decided to do twice as many as usually, because there will be over twice as many colours (plus the last sheet of paper in the book, for good measure). That's my table covered with printmaking goodness. And here is the first colour:

I decided not to print every single corner because there simply isn't going to be any yellow showing, and I figure it will be easier later on if I don't have to perfectly line up the really dark colours on top of it, and still have some bright yellow poking through to ruin the whole thing. So I'm going to easy route (I hope). The nice thing about doing so many layers is that I don't feel I have to get a perfect print every time, because chances are most of it will be covered or obscured, so no one colour is the linchpin of the entire piece. Takes the pressure off a little.

Speaking of being glad there are many layers to come, look what I did to this print:

I noticed that there was a little build up of ink of the corner of the last print, so I grabbed a spare bit of paper and blotted it. Without thinking, it was written on with pencil, and that transferred into the ink, and from there on to this print. No big deal, it won't be seen by the time the rest of the layers are on, but certainly and amusing and potentially useful bit of information. For future reference?

The second layer was a little bit of bright green. It's only going to show up on one book in the final print, so, again, I only put it on a small section:

I'd like to give one of these away when I'm done! Leave a comment on any (or all, for extra entries) of the posts related to this piece for an entry. I'm going to draw it when it's finished.

Books Reduction Lino Print - Idea and Contest

I took a bunch of photos of old books a few months ago, and took one to separate into colours for a reduction lino print:

It's eleven colours. Eleven! That's ridiculous. But hey, the one with only four colours worked out well enough, so I'll just jump ahead to something way way more complicated instead of maybe taking it easy and doing one with, say, six or something. Sigh... oh well, that's how I roll. This should be interesting. I'm going to start with more prints, because I want to have at least six prints that turn out in the end, and if I only have six good ones out of eight (that I started printing) on a four colour reduction, I'll need to start with at least twice on this one, and be a lot more careful!

I have high hopes for this one, and since it's Christmas and I'm feeling warm and fuzzy toward the world, I'm going to give one away! Just leave a comment below this, or any of the posts about this lino cut (each one gets an entry). If you want extra entries, let me know that you've mentioned this on your blog.

Armillary Sphere - Last Two Colours

This was such an easy project, with only four colours total! Of course, I had to go and rush the third one, so I didn't get the registration right on a few because I was going too fast. grrrrrr. Oh well, I started with eight and will still have five or six good ones once I look over them to see how they turn out.

When I was mixing the last colour I discovered that the yellow ink actually has a fair bit of white in it, and made the black grey instead of turning it brownish. I ended up making it fairly purple in the end, which looked more like what my monitor did to the dark brown of the original colour separation I did when planning this.

I'm pretty happy about how it turned out. For the most part I cut everything where it's supposed to be, and I like the blue. It's still a learning print, but not too bad overall.

Armillary Sphere - First Two Colours

First of all, apologies for the crappy photo. I really am going to buy a nice scanner one of these days. I started doing the colours for the armillary sphere print, was was surprisingly easy. Yay! I got an easy carve lino block, and it has proved much less frustrating, and less painful, on my wrists. I could even still see all the pencil marks once I'd washed off the first layer of ink, which made my life considerably easier when it came to carving in the second colour. Here they are:

Armillary Sphere - Idea

 Reduction linos - right. That things I tried doing a couple times a few month ago and haven't touched since? Well, I'm on Christmas vacation now and pulling out a bunch of stuff I haven't had time for and generally puttering about my condo doing whatever occurs to. Peppermint martini this afternoon? Hells yes. Anyway... I was looking through the photos I worked on last summer for a new print. I had taken a few and separated the colours so they would be easy to carve. I choose this photo because it had the least amount of layers, and therefore, would be the easier not to screw up. This is what it looked like though:

Which is really pretty boring. So I played around with the colours, and finally decided on changing the middle brown to a nice blue:

and deleting some of the detail at the bottom. Very nice! I didn't even change the dark brown, but I like how it seems to look a little purple against the blue and yellow. Should be a much more interesting print this way.

Laughing Kids - Finished!

 Well, I'm finally done school, and that gives me a whole lot of free time to start drawing again, and to get a few posts up! I finished this a couple of weeks ago, but haven't been very good about posting things. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I think it has a lot of energy. Not to mention, I finally got everyone looking right, so that's a big bonus. It's been sent off and I hope will make someone very happy for Christmas.

Here's a couple close-ups of the faces: