Linocut in Progress: The Third Act

Time to wrap up this linocut! And we are wrapping at warp speed (see what I did there?)... because there are deadlines. Exhibition deadlines, yes... but another equally inflexible deadline that I will tell you about at the end of this post! 

So here we are at what I am calling Step 7, although if you count all the tiny inking stages that happened between Steps 3 and 4 we could also say it's Step 10. Your call.

I decided that even with, and perhaps because of, the blended rolls, the image was looking a bit like it had three distinct lines of background, middle ground, and foreground. Not that that is bad, necessarily, but I wanted to break it up a bit. 

Step 7 rollup

My solution was to create another ochre-y to greeny-gray-y (my color names are so descriptive!) blended roll, but this time I rolled it up on an angle. Corner-to-corner instead of side-to-side. 

Step 7 printed

Yes. Better, I think. One more big roll of color and then the details of the bird and I'm finished, I think! This time I only put blended color in the top third, and the rest of the block was a solid roll. 

Step 8 rollup

Step 8 printed

Okay! I like how this step broke up the larger shapes at the top and bottom of the image, but did so subtly. The whole scene is very busy with lots of movement, so a few places for the viewer to rest their eyes are essential. But to leave the larger shapes flat color was jarring. I felt good about this compromise.

There was a temptation here to squeeze in one more subtle layer in the water, but I resisted the urge and went for the final color on the bird. 

Step 9 rollup

It looks like I rolled up black here, but it really isn't. It's more of that dark licorice green, but it reads as black in the final image. 

And here it is! 

"In the Shallows"
Reduction linocut, edition of 20
© Sherrie York

Whew! I needed to finish this piece because I wanted to submit it to an exhibition jury that is coming up in April. 

April, you say? March isn't over yet... what's the rush? 

Well, there's always drying and photography time to consider, but I have also been acutely aware of this:

Yep. That is my bag with my passport in it. Something exciting begins in the next 48 hours... another inflexible deadline. Stay tuned!

Linocut in Progress: The Second Act

Alrighty, then! 

When last we spent time in the studio, things were off to a good start. This piece has sort of evolved like a trilogy: The first steps set the tone and set our adventurer on their way. In the second act things got... messy.

I mean, the printing went okay, as you'll see. But keeping up with the documentation didn't. Oops. There were a few little fussy steps that happened with no witnesses but me...

Linocut in progress: Steps 3.1, 3.2, 3.2 and 4.... printed in secret, apparently

These missing steps were mostly about the bird's head, and were done with spot inking and masks, as with the very first step. 

Step 3.1 was the soft green on the back of the bird's head.

Step 3.2 was the bright yellow of the beak.

Step 3.3 was the shadow on the side of the head and neck

And then there was Step 4, which I think was another blended roll of blues, but apparently I took no photo of the rollup. Probably because I was just so happy to be done with the little tedious bits and wanted to charge on ahead to something more satisfying.

But we did get back on track with documentation for Step 5:

Step 5 rollup

Look at those blues, will ya? On the block they look rather alarmingly bright, but printed they feel...

Well.

Hm.

Kind of bright. (Although this is a pretty awful photo. There has been a lot of photography on rainy days lately.)

Step 5 printed

So, okay.  Things here look bright, but there IS a method to my madness. Mostly. A lot of this blue is going to be covered by some very different hues, and I wanted to be certain the blues that remained would be able to hold their own. You'll see what I mean with Step 6:

Step 6 rollup

Yeah, WHAT? What is this all about? 

Well.... the bird is swimming in shallow water near the shore, which is why it's so choppy. I wanted to add some depth to the image, plus suggest the rocks that can be seen (sort of) below the surface of the water. Visually they look like dark greeny-browny shapes... rather nebulous, but they are creating the pattern of the water as much as being a part of it. I don't think I can literally represent the rocks without adding a significant number of intermediate steps to the process, but I want to suggest them.

My hope was that the ochre color across the top would create some yummy greens, and that the greeny-browny color in the lower 2/3 of the image would interact in interesting ways to create some more blues and greens in the foreground.

Step 6 printed

And surprise! It worked! (I bet you thought I was out of my mind. No problem. I did, too.)

It's coming together nicely now and I am fairly certain it can be finished in maybe 3 more color passes. But you know how that goes!

And now, as a bit of an aside:

Those of you who followed along with my recent problems of chromatic shifting of inks mixed with a lot of transparent base might be wondering what I'm up to here, because it certainly seems like there is  transparency going on in this piece! 

There is, although not nearly in the proportions I used to use. In this last step the ochre was rather more opaque than usual, which you can see because the resulting color after printing is still very warm and yellowish. The dark color was created with a mix of sepia ink and... wait for it... Payne's gray ink. Payne's gray is not a color I ever used when I was doing more painting, but both this color and the sepia are "semi-transparent" right out of the tube. I still wanted the color a little more transparent, so to be safe I pulled out my last half-used tube of Daniel Smith transparent extender, which is resin-based rather than linseed oil-based. I didn't use a lot of it, but it helped. 

Wait? Did I say Daniel Smith ink? 

Yes. Yes I did. I still have a small stash that I have been hoarding in the what? ten-plus years? since Daniel Smith abandoned their huge printmaking customer base and stopped manufacturing ink. Am I still bitter about that? Yes. Yes I am. Don't get me started.

I still haven't found a long term solution to the transparency issue... I might try again with the Graphic Chemical 1911 base that I used for the last... I dunno... 15 years? (I never like the DS transparent base... it was too sticky. But somehow ten years of sitting around has made it a bit better to work with.) I had trouble with a couple of batches of the GC 1911 arriving here discolored and already hardening in the can, which is what forced my shift to Cranfield in the first place. Until I have another solution, I'm learning to work in a new way, with a much smaller percentage of base, or none at all. 

Linocut in Progress: Color in a gray season

 Mud season came early to the midcoast this year. So. Much. Rain.

Seemed like a great time to get started on a piece with a little more color in it. I had big plans, but they started in a quite humble way.

This piece has a fair amount of white in it... mostly little bitty shapes, so there was a bit of carving to do before I rolled up the first color. And even then, I didn't get much satisfaction immediately, because my first color pass was just some spot inking of a pale yellow color. This represents some super-small areas of warm reflection in an otherwise very cool-toned image to come. 

Linocut in progress: Step 1 rollup

To keep the color contained I cut a newsprint mask...

Step 1 mask

And printed...

Step 1 printed

Hard to photograph, since the color was so pale... and the image is at an angle to avoid wet ink reflections, but you get the idea.

The good news is that there was only a small amount of carving to do to hold these shapes before I could get going with a more satisfying color pass. 

I rolled up a cheery, blended seafoam-to-pale-blue. I rolled it on the block in one direction, and then turned the block around so I could roll in the other direction and make the gradation go from green to blue to green.

Step 2 rollup and mask

And oh! I made a little newsprint mask to keep a chunk of the main subject from building up too much color too soon.

Step 2 printed

For bird geeks and sea duck fans the subject is likely already apparent. But we'll keep up the suspense for everyone else, eh?

Step 3! This time just a straight-up light blue with enough transparency to it to be affected by the purdy tones laid down in Step 2.

Step 3 rollup

Step 3 printed

Off to a really satisfying start! I feel good about the movement already, and the cheery color palette. I know, however, that things are going to change dramatically as the piece goes on, so it's best not to get too attached yet. Stay tuned!

Linocut in Progress: Let's wrap this up!

 Okay...  Remember that cartoon in which a couple of scientists stand at a chalk board filled with complex equations, at the bottom of which is the phrase, "And then a miracle occurs"? 

That's kind of how the documentation of this linocut seems to have gone. A bunch of photos and a few steps that seem to be missing and then the piece is somehow done. So..... somehowwww..... Art=Science. Yay! We knew that.

Step.... let's call it 11....

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 11

Hey, this looks like more spot inking. Which I had warned you about in the last post. Perhaps I am psychic. (Or perhaps this piece was already finished when I wrote that last post and I have just been drawing things out for dramatic effect. You don't know.)

Some green in the head, another grey across the back, and oops! I had missed a little bit of rust color in the reflection last time. 

Hard to tell what's happening in the small images of the overall print, so how about I show you a detail for Step 11?  It's still not great.... this thing has been crazy-hard to photograph. But now you can see that there's a little more detail in the head and some subtle color in the the reflections. 

And here's where that miracle mentioned above comes into play. It appears there was another pass of some transparent gray over the bird's head and back, but I don't have any photos for it. Also some more spot inking in the head... tiny areas... ditto. 

Here's what things looked like after Step 12 or 13...

Step 13... Super hard to tell what has changed!

But now we are in the home stretch. One last dark gray-green to hit just some details in the head and those lovely feathers on the side....

Step 14 rollup

And then I waited a couple of days until the prints were dry enough that I could get an actual scan... This image is slightly embiggenable if you click on it.

Merganser linocut (needs a title!), Click to embiggen!

So, whew! That's the first new reduction linocut of the year all finished. I'm sidetracking for a couple of days to work on another project, and then hopefully there will be another one underway next week. 

Linocut in Progress: Complications. Of course.

Honestly. If I had a dollar for every time I thought I'd reach the end of a linocut in "just a couple more simple steps" I'd be a gazillionaire. This is art-making, after all, and if you are somehow still harboring the illusion that "being an artist" is all rainbows and "doing the thing you love" I am afraid I must burst that bubble for you. A lot of it is, quite simply, a slog. Or it involves a lot of hair-pulling and bashing-upon-the-table of one's forehead. Or all of the above.

At its most basic, my job is to create problems for myself and then somehow find my way out of them. Mostly I am better at creating problems than solving them. But hey. We all have our skills.

If it's not enough to confuse myself with the actual making of linocuts, I also confuse myself in my attempts to record the process. I've got a bunch of photos. Let's see if we can make any sense out of them.

Reduction linocut in progress: Steps... Hm. 7 and 8? Or 8 and 9?

I have this photo, and while it obviously represents two steps, I'm not sure if they are 7 and 8... or 8 and 9. In my last post I did the spot inking for the head, beak, and breast of the bird... Step 7. That should be it at the bottom of the photo, but it seems a little dark. I might have run a layer of transparent gray over the whole bird at this point, or it might just be that the light was different in the studio that day. 

Either way, the print on top represents a clear next step... and here was its roll-up:

Let's call this Step 8

Step 8 printed

And here's where things got a little more.... well.... more. My original "plan" (like I ever have a plan) was to keep the bird and its reflections really close together in value and very gray in tone. But at this point I thought the whole piece would get better with "just a bit" more color. Back to spot inking! A gray-green and a red in the bird's beak and eye, and the reflections below.

Step 9 rollup

Ugh. I know... All these stages were hard to photograph, so this image isn't great. But you get the idea, I hope.

Step 9 printed

So nowww....

Step 10 rollup

Back to an overall gray. Fairly transparent. 

Step 10 printed

This particular photo seems pretty true to color and value for this stage, so maybe let's stop here and take a breather. The whole piece seems so close to completion, but something is still not quite right. I predict more spot inking on the horizon. 

Linocut in Progress: It's time for the M word...

And what's the M-word? Masking, of course. When I typed a title for this post I realized that I have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the word "mask," here in what we could call the sort of post-pandemic period. 

But the type of mask I refer to is made of newsprint, not filter paper, and it doesn't have strings attached. Not literal ones, anyway. 

Reduction printing involves applying all the colors of an image from (often) a single block, layer by layer. But sometimes one doesn't need a particular color to print over the entire image, so little feats of acrobatic fussiness can be employed in the form of masking.

For example... here we are at Step 4 of the current linocut in progress. I'm adding another blue to the water, but it's not a color that's necessary in the body of the bird. I rolled ink over the entire block, but I also covered up some areas with bird-shaped pieces cut from newsprint. These newsprint "masks" prevent the ink from transferring to the print in those areas.

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 4 rollup and newsprint mask in waiting.

Hm. Sometimes I explain that better. (This is not an example of exemplary explanation. Say THAT three times fast.)  I also didn't take a photo of the block on the press with the mask in place. (Honestly, Sherrie. Get with the program here!) But here's the print at this stage:

Step 4 printed

See? No darker blue ink in the bird shape. It's still gray, as it was in the previous step. Clear as mud? Good, because there's more of this sort of thing to come. 

Step 5! 

Step 5 rollup and masks

Here is another blue (another!) which I don't want in the bird OR in its reflection. So I cut two mask shapes from newsprint and set them in the appropriate spot(s) on the inked block. 

Step 5 printed

Et voila! Except, oh dear. Lousy photo. This was a late night print session, so overhead artificial light reflected strongly on the wet ink. However, I think you can see that the bird and a portion of the reflection did not print this darker blue.

Now it was time to think about some wee bits of color that need to go into the body of the bird, NOT into the water. For this step I'll do some spot inking combined with masking. 

Step 6 spot inking and mask

The breast of the bird needs to be a sort of brick color and the bill is an orangey red. (It looks super orange in this photo!) I used small brayers to roll this ink only in those two areas, and this time I placed a mask around those shapes instead of on top of them. This created a little window for the color to peek through and transfer to the prints in only those areas. 

Here is the block on the press, with the mask in place, ready for the print to be placed face-down on top of it.

Step 6 ready to print

Step 6 printed

The bird's head also needed to be green, so there was another round of spot inking and masking to apply that color. No photos of the green mask, but here's the result.

Step 7 printed

Things are moving right along now, and it seems quite clear what our subject is! All this bright color will be toned down in the next steps, but so far so good!

Linocut in Progress: New year, new energy

Happiness is... first ink on fresh paper. All images slightly embiggenable with a click.

Well. It's been a while since ol' Brush and Baren has seen much action. 2023 was a challenging year for me in a lot of ways and my good intentions weren't enough to balance the energy scales. 

2024 is off to a better start, and I'm determined to move forward in all kinds of good ways. The first of those has been getting a linocut started. Finally. 

So let's get... rolling!

Linocut in progress: Step 1 rollup

Despite all my efforts to come up with a composition that wasn't long and skinny, here I am, working on something long and skinny. I actually love this format, but it can be a tricky one for people to find place for on their walls. And let's face it, I do have to think about those sorts of things. Ah, well! Long and skinny it is. And a very pale blue to start because, let's face that, too... it's almost always the case.

I need to say something about ink, however, especially since it was part of my difficult 2023. Longtime readers might notice that for a first color, the rollout above seems remarkably opaque. 

For decades I have worked my prints similarly to watercolors... by layering very transparent colors to create a number of effects. I did this by using boatloads of transparent (non-pigmented) ink with just a smidge of pigmented ink mixed in. 

During the peak of the pandemic I couldn't get the brand of transparent base that I usually use, so I bought a different one. I've used other brands before, no problem... so I carried on as usual. What I didn't realize was that the formulation of this "new" base was significantly different from those I had used previously. Using high quantities of it turned out to be a bad idea, but I wasn't to discover this until months later. 

It turns out that the new-to-me brand contains linseed oil which, when stored in the dark (such as in a flat file, as all my pieces are) undergoes a chromatic shift. Which is a fancy way of saying all the prints turn yellow. Think of old oil paintings, which were often varnished with linseed oil. 

So, yes. Entire editions of work... basically everything I did last year, and a couple of pieces from the year before that, have discolored. Oddly, the color will eventually change back when exposed to light... but that's pretty much the antithesis of the usual thought about preserving work. I put UV-blocking glass on my work, and I've noticed that one of the pieces in question from last year, which is also on the least-light wall of my sitting room, has discolored under the glass, even though it was never stored in the drawer. Sigh.

I've pulled the questionable images from circulation... luckily I hadn't exhibited any of the really horribly affected ones from last year, so none went out into the world. But it was a demoralizing blow, to be sure. 

Which is a lot of words to say I am learning to work a new way... learning to balance the use of white ink with transparent base. Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 1 printed

So, blah blah blah INK blah blah blah. Here's the first step printed. A nice pale blue. Interestingly, I found it easier to get an even tone with a little bit more opacity to the ink. Lots of transparent base was always a challenge to get applied evenly on the block.

On to Step 2! Oh look! Some things never change. Here's another light, slightly grayed down, blue.

Step 2 rollup

Again, I was pleased with how nicely the ink was rolling out. Technical problems when I was already feeling wobbly about working would have been no fun at all.

Step 2 printed

I bet that birder-types will already recognize the species here!

Things are moving right along. Time for a definite gray, rather than blue.

Step 3 rollup

And, voila! It's official. I am back to work. 

Whew.

Step 3 printed

Linocut in Progress: The Finish and the Rescue

 In the first post about the process of this linocut I mentioned that I was distracted and unfocused during the time I worked on it... which has been super clear from the erratic photo documentation! The funny thing is that when I started the image I had designs on thoroughly documenting it and making a video of the process. But when the warping problem became apparent fairly early on... well. Not a good candidate for video documentation if the whole thing ended up being scrap paper.

So let's not prolong the agony, shall we? Let's roll up some ink and finish this thing.

Step 8 ink rollup

Wow. Okay. That's some ink, alright. I did say I wanted to break up all that green... but this seems like a bit... extra. It's so orange! Remember your color theory, though. Red and green are opposites on the color wheel, with a tendency to dull each other down and, I hope, create a warm brown.

Still, it must have seemed like a lot at the time, because I have no photos of what the image looked like at this stage. Coward. 

But it's clear I did create a ninth color pass, because there are two values of what reads as a brown in the final image. It looks like this!

"Bobolink," reduction linocut, 7" x 5" - Edition of 20

There are a few more little darks in the green areas of the vegetation as well as the second value of brown, so I'm guessing the final pass was one last transparent gray.

So here we are. The images look nice... I managed to hold the registration together even though the paper was so warped. But when I say "so warped," I mean So. Warped. 

Look:

I mentioned in previous posts that I knew this was a problem fairly early on, and that the issue kept compounding as I carried on with printing. It was not a problem of too much press pressure. The block was not pressing into the paper enough to cause any embossment. But the ambient humidity was enough that even light press pressure was enough to stretch the paper. 

About halfway through the process I did stop and try to flatten them. I was away teaching for a week when the prints were about half finished, so I stacked them under glass and weights and hoped for the best. It did help. A little. But as you can see in this photo, it wasn't enough, and by the time I finished all the color passes I had prints that were so wobbly they couldn't be made to lay flat even under a mat. 

Time for Plan B. 

I was away for another week at the beginning of September, which was enough time for the finished prints to dry completely. 

There are many reasons why I prefer to use traditional oil-based inks for my prints, but this Challenge of the Warped Linocuts added another to the list. Once the prints were dry, a little water wasn't going to hurt them. At least I didn't think it would. Luckily I had a few "reject" prints to experiment with. 

I first tried just spraying one side of the paper with a light spritz of water and tacking the print out on a board. It helped a little, but not enough. 

Desperate times called for desperate measures. Enter Plan C! I took the prints to the sink and ran cold water over both sides of the paper. Yep. I held my prints under the faucet. I pressed them between sheets of blotter paper until they were merely damp, and then taped them out on a board like watercolors (or etchings):

And it worked! Whew. Luckily I had printed these with plenty of paper margin, because of course the tape damaged the edges of the paper. But there's plenty of extra to trim these down and still have a nice image with plenty of space. 

As I am writing this, we are just saying goodbye to the remnants of Hurricane Lee, which blew through here yesterday. The air behind it is cooler and drier than we've had in a while, and I'm hopeful that we've left the worst of heat and humidity behind for a while. I'm not sure what the next image will be, but I'm looking forward to working on it without warping issues. 

And I'm happy to know that a solution I have long regarded as theoretical has turned out to be viable. Just in case.