Stain 3

Well, work continues....

I printed 25 onto Nishinouchi, an off-white mulberry paper and the blue didn't print quite grey enough and I think my earlier proof on white paper came out better. I'll take a little pause. Let these dry and decide whether to add another color or pass on the tie to deepen the color or just print a second batch in a different color scheme on white paper. I pulled this out of the batch as I plan on gluing one down face up on a hardwood block, carving the tie again and polishing the other copies to make the tie shiny and silky looking.

They are a bit less yellow than this appears on my monitor.

Almost there

Well, while I didn't get into the studio as much as I'd have liked--I managed to get these proofs done today and I'm pretty happy. I carved all day Sunday. Trimmed paper and printed these color proofs today. There is still some tidying up to do. The thin tie stripes need to be cut back a bit at the bottom to match the color tie block but we are almost there.
There will still be some surprise. It would be too boring for me to know exactly where this will end up--I'll be printing on Nishinouchi, an warm, off-white, slightly newsprinty paper that will change the colors somewhat. And I won't really decide until I'm sitting down with the bowls and colors in front of me which one I'll do. But I've only cut 25 pieces of paper so there will probably be another run and that will allow another color.
The biggest challenge still is the blood spot. It has three colors/impressions and it's still not right.

Stains and colors

I printed some sample proofs from my fresh keyblock.
The original idea was a simple black and white line drawing with the red blood stain on the white shirt. (I thought of carving different color stains --coffee, blood, etc but that seemed pushing it a bit too far).
But with some proofs on hand I decided to color some in with watercolor.
The one on the bottom R is my favorite;it would be sort of a halftone, bluegray--all the colors would be shades of grey except for the stain; the others are as can be seen above--I like the yellow tie more than the blue one.
The risk is that the subject--the blood spot--might be lost if too much energy and interest is directed at the necktie and colors.

The red stain will be cut off the key block and recarved so it will be much more noticeable. I'm also planning on adding a bit of alcohol to the color to make it seep a bit.

Any favorites/comments before I carve the next block?

Carving Blood

Well, I decided to step away from my big Jajim print for a little pause. I haven't done any carving since early this year and I wanted to make some chips fly.

SO I went back into my unfinished projects file and pulled out a little print that never got farther than a preparatory sketch. While brainstorming ideas for one of the Baren Forum exchanges I posted this as one of the ideas that got nixed. Several followers--well, most of them actually since I have so few--said that it was too bad as they liked the idea.
So did I. So I went back to my preparatory sketch--it was on old mat board and I looked it over--I added some type for the title and drove over to Kinko's and made a xerox to serve as my Hanshita. Glued it down that night and spent most of yesterday carving the keyblock. This morning I recut a few spot repairs I made on some slips. It looks mostly ok but it's carved pretty shallowly so printing will tell if it's deep enough.

Now I'm back into a stretch of shifts for work until next week but hope to get in to test print and see how much cleaning up I need to do on this block. And how many other blocks I'll need.