Printing day

I’ve got a stack of blocks for various prints carved, but not as many finished prints. I don’t print an entire edition at once, unless it’s an easy one on my treadle press, but I want to get a stack of each of the new ones ready as I go along instead of having to do it all this fall ahead of the WAMA exhibit.

Today was fiddly printing. I’d put down the simple blue backgrounds yesterday, but today’s was three colors and four rollers. First I rolled the trees in black with a small roller. Then I wiped underneath them with a paper towel to keep the water from being too dark. Then I’d add gray in the water. Then pink in the clouds and a bit more loosely in the water. Finally I’d do the upper clouds in gray with a larger roller. I love the effect of rolling multiple colors (the technical term is a rainbow roll, which is way better than lots of technical terms out there), but it takes patience and time. I only got seven of this one done today, and this one is time consuming enough I’ll probably keep it at a smaller edition than most of my prints. I’m really pleased with how it came out though, and I’m happy to have a couple of local to Ocean Springs scenes ready for my show there. Memphis is home, and the Old Forest is my Horn Island, but it’s also nice to nod to Anderson’s landscape in a show at his museum.

I keep a book of my prints with notes on each print, how many I’ve editioned already, and color samples for when I print the next batch. It really helps me to have all that information in one place. I’m not a super organized person, but the print book is key.