Click on this delightful photo to make it larger than you see here...

Here it is. Sorry, I wish I knew how to take better photos. The lines are at right angles to each other at the edge of the design, but this shows them as distorted. The colors are also very vibrant in the original print.

I have only printed a few of the prints with black, but this is enough for now! I need a break.

This method for creating a color print makes it possible to print more than one color a day. With the reduction printing method, the colors actually lay over one another, making a mess if you try to print before the first color is dry. But with this method, the colors just kiss at the edges. Today I was able to print two colors. Tomorrow I will do the blue and black, and then I will be done! Huzzah!

I have only wasted two prints, and both deliberately. I used them to test color and make judgments about registration issues. I would say that my skills have significantly improved since I made that previous playing card print. I planned well for this one. About a third of the time spent on this piece was planning. I thought that the final tally of hours spent on this print would be embarrassing, but it will only be about 70 hours.

I will post the final tomorrow, I hope!

#17 - Comedy of Errors - One Down, Four to Go

Bad Photo Alert

The first color is down. The most difficult and time-consuming layer do to the large amount of inking. I made 35 prints in hopes of ending up with 25. I keep feeling a nagging worry that perhaps I have made some huge mistake that I just haven't noticed yet. I'm not sure where that worry is coming from. Maybe it's that I'm trying a new way of registering the colors, so feel like I'm flying blind. I won't know if the colors are well registered until I put the black on, which is last step.

I'm using two kinds of paper. One is machine made rice paper called Masa, and the other is handmade paper called Kozo, which is made of mulberry. It's translucent, and so delicate that it seems like you could eat it.

#17 - Permission Granted: The Adventure Begins

Ah, the smell of linoleum, the shavings flying! Would be heavenly bliss if my shoulder didn't complain about the party.

It's been a long week of waiting for the go ahead to start making this piece. Tough to wait. It's going to be a peach. Maybe even epic, at least compared to what I've made so far.

I spent the time this week perusing books about the woodcut printing of the Edo period in Japan. Did you know that James Michener wrote an entire book on the subject? I also got four books on woodblock printing to get an idea of what the process entails. Woodblock printing is another world. I may visit that world.

#17 - Comedy of Errors - Revised Sketch - UPDATE: Final Piece Added

SCROLL DOWN FOR FINAL PIECE

Pretty close to complete... I want to do a split fountain effect on the masks, blending in white. I may get rid of the lines coming out of the mouths since they are a little ambiguous. The changes I made are essentially ones that made it look more like a playing card. I added the hands and made the whole thing more of a mirror image. I think this accentuates the happy/sad drama mask difference since everything else is more consistent. I look at this and it seems decisive to me, and that's a goal I'm always shooting for with my art.

UPDATE:
This page gets a lot of hits, so I thought I would post the completed piece as well: