Slow progress this week. The exciting stuff is done, now it’s down to putting color on paper. And that takes time.
So far, I’ve done four impressions: tan, light green, yellow, and yellow-orange. I’m starting with the lightest colors. That’s always tricky, because the light colors look bright and intense when that’s all there is on the paper, but when you add the darker blocks, the light ones wash out. So it’s guesswork. We’ll see how it all turns out.
For the tan, I mixed up a nice dark brown (an old mixed blue + rubine red + diarylide yellow), added some extender, and rolled it out very thin.
This gave me a nice light golden brown for the outer borders. There’s no picture of that color alone on the print, sorry, but here they are hanging up to dry. 24 on Rives BFK light, 8 on Rives BFK medium, and two on Torinoko, just to use up what I had lying around from woodblock printing. Torinoko is the loveliest paper, but expensive!
For the green, the ink mixing was similar – a nice, bright green, not too yellow, with a bit of extender, and rolled out very, very thin. Here’s what the ink looks like.
And here’s the inked block ready to print. I used a lot of masks each time I printed – just thin strips of scrap paper. This shape had so many small bits sticking out, it was hard to keep the background clear. I wiped the surrounding block clean after each inking, before printing, but used the masks also, to be sure nothing would transfer where it shouldn’t.
And here’s the print, with two colors on it. So far, so good.
After that, I started on the tulip – all that light yellow and orange. The first impression was pure Diarylide yellow, shaded lighter in the center. I used a dabbing stroke with the smallest brayer (1 ½ inches), and worked radially, overlapping strokes and not very concerned with an even spread.
Then I transferred the design lines to the tulip block again, carved away just a little near the center, and printed again with a slightly more orange-y yellow.
And that’s it for this week.