Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Linocut in Progress: Starting to look like.... something. Maybe.

I'll bet you can guess what I did this past weekend...

Carving, silly. Of course!

I also worked on some contract illustrations, which meant I didn't get around to printing until Monday, but hey! We've got some extra light later in the day... printing can go on and on and on now.

Step 3 was a straight-up transparent blue, rolled up with my regular 8" Takach brayer instead of the mondo roller. I wanted to counter some of the lap marks and such from the earlier blended rolls.

Reduction linocut in progress, Step 3
Step 3 printed

Feeling pretty good, still. There is at least one more color pass to go in the water, probably another blended roll, but I haven't decided if I should do that next or go on to work on the birds. With this pass it should be clear where the birds will go. Small grebes afloat in the tempest.

I really am flying by the seat of my pants here, even more than usual. Just for the sake of amusement, I thought you might like to see the reference photo that is inspiring this piece:


Yep. This is it. I put my phone up to the eyepiece of my spotting scope... dialed all the way in at 60x zoom. The purpose of this shot was species identification, not linocut reference. In the field I thought perhaps those were horned grebes, but they are unusual in my area and they were soooo far away. Once I downloaded the photo I was able to scale up the shot and confirm the ID... at which point I decided I quite liked the rhythm of the water and the birds asleep in the swells. There's not much to work with here in terms of color or detail, but I'm hoping the idea will carry the day.

No comments:

Post a Comment

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 deadline...