Well, I finished printing 85 small, vine snake, woodblock prints today.
I had two bad prints--one with the classic error of flipping the print and printing one block upside down and another that shifted slightly during the printing of the keyblock.
There are also quite a few "outliers"; prints that are just fairly different from the rest; Some are more yellow; some more brown. Some of my backgrounds didn't print evenly and when I reprinted them the doubling of pigment made for a much deeper and darker background.
The same is true of the snake. Since his "GREEN" is really pthalo blue glazed thinly over a strong yellow---when I printed him a little unevenly and had to reprint it it became much more blue-green.
But all-in-all there are only 2-3 real rejects and since it wasn't long ago that my reject rate was nearly 50% I've made progress in both my carving and printing.
40 were printed on Awagami Kozoshi--a machine made hemp and kozo paper that I got a while ago from Daniel Smith and these will go out to the Baren Forum's Chinese New Year/Zodiac exchange.
A 90g/m2 paper fairly white paper, they printed pretty well but are a little more "flat" than the others.
Another 18 were printed on my home-sized Hosokawa paper to see how they would print.
Another 20 were printed on a machine-made, roll kozo paper from the Japanese paper place in Toronto.
And I printed 6 on a small strip of Gekko Paper from Woodlike Matsumura which printed amazingly gorgeous but was almost impossible to print by hand (25Monme) very, very, thick and strong kozo.
I won't try printing on it again as it really was too hard.
I just finished layering the finished prints between blotter sheets and epsom board and weighted them to get them to dry flat.
Happy to be done printing although I suspect I will print another run to get to an edition varie' of about 150 or so.
But I'm taking a little break first to rest.
