Last Year's Grasses, Finished

So, here's the finished print from my last post. I'm feeling so-so about it. I discovered and worked out some things with color and value which will help me out in the future, and then proceeded to totally overuse them. I also had some vision problems about half way through this one and once I missed a bunch of stray orange marks outside the edges and inside some of the prints, I kind of lost interest and just wanted to get it over with so I could move on with my life.

This is #5, my fifth reduction print. The first one was back in August, and I ended up disappointed with it after the amount of time I had put in. I tried again at the end of January and that print ended up in a juried show, giving me some encouragement to keep going with it, even though I was disappointed with it as well. I'm starting to wonder when I'm going to look at a finished print and say "I am happy with this." But yet I am totally compelled to keep going with it.

I am satisfied with the color on these. There are about twelve-fourteen of them, each on a different background. Using different backgrounds helped me come to the realization that I think I prefer that things have either a background of yellow ochre or one of the umbers. And I realized that's where it gets a little tricky, or easier, because once you have a background every color choice you make is dependent on what's below. You have to put some thought into it if you want to end up with mud, but you can acieve some great intensity if you do it right. I had been trying to make colors darker by making them darker until I had a totally "DUH" moment. This is transparent oil paint in thin layers. If I want to make red darker, don't add black to the red, print a thin layer of viridian. Rich darkness achieved, finally!

I also discovered that a very integral part of this whole printing process is being able to see what you are doing. Into my second impression of orange on the grass, after moving lights around and adding lights, I suddenly realized that the problems I was having with lighting were not due to the lighting. I couldn't see very well! A cheap pair of reading glasses confirmed it. My prescription had changed and I didn't have a clue that it had happened. Carving was much easier that night, but I didn't bother to put them on when I was printing and looking at my prints.

Big mistake. I missed stray printing marks all over the place, stray printing marks that I didn't even notice until a day later, when I took out my contacts and put on my glasses because my eyes were still bothering me when I worked on the computer. The thought had briefly crossed my mind that the problem could be the contacts, and not my eyes, but I had dismissed it. Once I took them out and put on my glasses I immediately remembered a comment that my 13-year-old son had made a few days earlier, about feeling dizzy. Even though our cases are completely different and his is marked, he had somehow switched them. I'm still seeing the eye doctor this week, because the reading glasses did make a difference, and I am also keeping my contacts in a different bathroom from here on out.

Now the question is what to do with all of these prints, that look ok for the most part, but have these little errors all over the place, especially outside the edges. Maybe I'm just too picky, and once I finally open an Etsy store people won't care about the little mistakes. Or maybe I'll just sell them all as proofs, or mat them to hide the edges, or, leave them stacked in that growing pile of artwork.

This whole thing is such a learning process, and with each print I've worked out problems I had in the previous one. And I'm totally in love with the process. But sooner or later I'm going to have to try and generate a little income from it, so it can start paying for itself.

Printing With Oil Paints 1.0

So, since I first began hand pulling prints about a year ago, I knew right away that I liked carving the blocks. I also knew I had a lot to figure out about ink and paper, because I wasn't having much luck on that front. I tried dry paper, damp paper, wet paper, thin paper, thick paper, cheap paper, expensive paper, all without producing anything close to a satisfying result. And the same goes for the ink... Speedball water soluable ink out of the tube, and in various stages of thinned out using a variety of methods to get it on the block. Next I moved on to watercolors. I liked them better from the start, but I was still having problems with the pulling prints process.

Now I'm not saying that I haven't made some prints that I like, because I have. But there's always something kind of disappointing about them. The reduction prints seem to start off well, but by the end it seems like a struggle to find the enthusiasm to finish them because there's something I've done that I wish I hadn't. The paper was too wet for one impression and crinkled. The color was wrong on one impression and threw off the whole image. The registration was off. There was a big line outside the printed area where I missed wiping off excess color and didn't notice while printing. The list could go on and on.

But yet I've been compelled to go on. Half way through a print I'm already thinking about what's next and what I'll do differently to make it better. It's like an addiction, and I can't get enough of it, even though the printing process itself had become frustrating.

Then I tried using oil paints. My first attempt is to the left. I could get nice, intense, vibrant colors that were transparent, with texture. I could brush on the paint and thin it out and work with the paint on the block. And I could use dry paper!

My first reduction print with with the oils is below. The printing process that has been taking a week or more to end up with maybe a couple of decent prints took three days with little to no frustration. And I enjoyed the process. And I have the next one planned.

19th Annual Dayton Area Works On Paper

So today I went to the opening reception of the 19th Annual Dayton Area Works on Paper at the Rosewood Art Gallery. It was the first time I've ever had anything hanging at an art show, and the first time I've ever submitted anything to a juried show. I submitted two prints and the one pictured (or one that kind of resembles it) was accepted.

It's a good show. Lots of variety and plenty of strong artwork, a lot of it by well known Dayton artists. Around 250 pieces submitted with 55 being selected.

I'm not sure why mine was there. I guess it looked OK, but I'm kind of surprised it was chosen. Or maybe it's that I'm not sure why I chose it, because there are better ones in this edition. And I hate the way I matted it. It has nice clean edges and I cropped them because I don't like the leaf on the bottom left. I have to keep reminding myself that this stuff takes a lot of time, and after all, it's carved, and getting a gradient using layers of carving not exactly an easy process, so maybe I earned some points for that.

All in all, it was kind of anticlimactic. It was nice to see it there, but I didn't really like seeing it that much. A little uncomfortable. Maybe this stuff is better left in the growing pile of unfinished artwork until I make something I look at and think, "Wow. I'm happy with that."

Block Printing 102 - Registration

A huge thank you out to Steve M, a friend with extensive knowledge of the commercial printing industry, who this past weekend, in five minutes and with a two-inch sketch, totally took the mystery out of creating a pin-based registration system for use in my block printing experimentation. The examples above have between 5-10 impressions each and the registration was effortlessly spot on.

Next up will be "Unleashing the Secret of Thin, Transparent Ink." A good starting place would be the moment I realized, after struggling with ink coverage, that that I am using opaque ink and to get it transparent I'll need something called extender. Probably, I should pick up a tube of yellow ink as well. Trying to mix colors using gold in its place has yielded some interesting, yet slightly too metallic, results.

Updated once I saw the image next the title block:
The background from the title block is a section of a pastel I did a couple of years ago...two years later, different medium and almost the exact same color combination. One of these days I need to throw some other colors into the mix. It is fairly obvious which colors I reach for first, time after time. No wonder I have yet to buy yellow ink.

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