Well, color is tricky.
If you mix Napthol Red with a little bit of Prussian Blue, it makes a nice dark red. Great! Add more blue and print over the first dark red, and you get a good darker red shadow. It looks about the same if you print that darker red on white paper. But print it on a nice, creamy R BFK, and what do you get? Brown.
Time for a new color mix – Rubine Red plus Prussian Blue. On the glass where I mix colors, it makes a pinky-purple, about the color of beet juice. On R BFK, well, it’s as close as I’m going to get to dark red. I’d call it maroon – that color that some people see as brown, some see as purple. Good enough.
Color as mixed:
And as printed ( Impression 16, actually 17, because I find I miscounted earlier)
Those of you with sharp eyes will notice I forgot to ink the narrow space under the little red bottle. It wasn’t carved away, just missed in the inking. A simple fix – Impression 17 and a half? Call it 18. Then on to black!
This is scary. Will it all match up? Also, there’s a question. In the original black carving, I had thin outlines for all the tulip petals and shading. I needed them to transfer those lines onto the tulip block. But if I leave those in, it doesn’t make my eyes happy. The strong black contrast over the orange and yellow overwhelms the shading, and sort of traps the tulip behind the lines. I want it to glow! But if I just print the tulip’s outline, it seems too isolated from the rest of the print. So I want some of those fine lines to extend from the outline into the tulip. But not too many, not too long, not too dark. I cut away bit by bit, and printed test pieces, using prints that were already mis-registered or smudged. This is the latest version, and I may cut away a little bit more.
Impression 19:
There is one little bit left to patch. It’s where the tulip leaf breaks the border. My black block was too narrow to include the outline of the leaf. I’ll carve a little out of the green block and print it with that. But I’m not going to post that step. You’ve seen how I do patches.
Printing is going slowly now. The fine lines require light inking, but of course it has to be thick enough to be solid. The black ink is being printed over multiple ink layers, so it wants to build up and shine and dry slowly, if at all. (On some of my older prints, the shiny bits are still sticky!) That means blotting, very carefully, so I don’t smudge anything. And it’s stressful, knowing that this is the make-or-break point for each print.
I started with thirty-four. There are five or six definitely out, and may well be more. I’m hoping to end up with twenty-five or more. It’s been exciting, frustrating, demanding, and, I think, worth while. I’ve learned a lot – hope you have too. And my next print will be very small, with only one color! Or maybe two. Or three…