I'm really taking advantage of being home with the printing press, and I'm also trying to get some proofs pushed toward final prints ahead of the holiday season. So I did more color proofs of the line of trees, as well as doing a batch of green under blocks. I'll do more colors and add the top layer in the next week or so. I also reprinted an old favorite. I hadn't printed many of these to begin with. It's part of my art deco travel series, but it's in North Carolina, so my Memphis audience doesn't have as many connections to this place. I've always really liked it, though, and a friend requested I do more. It's a grand idea. This one is four colors and three printings (the two greens are blended on the block), and it takes a bit, but I did a stack of them this week, so I'll have some available.

I also ordered a second proof of P is for Possum in the premium color. I wasn't happy with the standard one I got, but the cover had fantastic color, so I'm hoping that will be what comes in the interior as well with the premium printing. I'm excited about the book, but I want to get it right before I send it out into the world. Soon though!

This last print I left finished but hadn't actually printed. I'm trying it on different colored paper this week, and I've got a range from white to fawn, light blue, warm gray, and brown. I quite like all of them for different reasons, and I figure others might too. This one is available now. $90, and the paper is 13.25x14". Holler if you'd like one for a holiday present. I'll get it up in my store soon.

I printed in the morning, sketched in the afternoon, and ordered a hard copy proof of P is for Possum just before dinner, for a rare art trifecta today. I’d been waiting for the chance to order a proof since I uploaded my files on Saturday. I’m using Ingram Spark to self publish. Ingram is a wide reaching company that supplies books to libraries and book stores, and I wanted to support them instead of Amazon for self publishing. They also offer a hardback option, which Amazon doesn’t, but I’d heard nightmare stories about getting the formatting right for them. I did a bunch of research last week, and I was thrilled to get the email today that everything checked out. First try. It’s the small things.

Now that the book is turned in, I’ve been working on printing the blocks I carved this summer while I was away. Today’s theme was green (sounds like Sesame Street!), so I proofed two different blocks and also did layer two of the French Broad River print from several years ago. I’d printed the blue layer before my trip and then gotten sidetracked. Today, since I had green ink mixed and going, I picked the thread back up. Tomorrow I’ll get to proof on top of these gradated color layers with the much more intricately carved key blocks and see what things look like. Seeing it all together for the first time always feels like Christmas.

This afternoon I took my walk with the sketching backpack along and stopped in the Old Forest to sketch. I’ve been pondering more forest prints, and sketching helps me look deeply and think more clearly. We’ll see if anything comes of this, but it felt lovely to take the time to do it.

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I’m doing some proofing today, away from my regular set up. I wanted to see how the rv and lettering were going on the Explore print, so I just proofed the bottom half or so. It’s a tall skinny print, and I haven’t gotten to the top part yet. There will also be a color block behind it, but my lining-things-up-and-keeping-them-straight stuff (“registration” is the technical printmaking term) is all back in Memphis, so I may just wait on that part till I get home. This one is also quite tall, 24”, so the press would be helpful as well.

I did try a double layer for this second print, much smaller, so it felt less hard to manage, but the make-shift set up I tried moved on me. You can see that the one on the left especially moved as I printed. It gave me some helpful information anyway, but I may wait till home to do much more work on this one. I’m trying to decide if I need two blocks for the two blues (and you can see that if I do, they need to be curved a bit at the join), or if one block rolled carefully will be just as easy. I want the round light to be larger in the final version, but it’s always easy to take more away, and you can’t put it back, so I started conservatively. It’s the dock light across the lake from me at my first camping stop in Missouri. It’s nice to take your muse on the road once in a while and get some new views. The RV print is our campsite in Idaho a few days later.

I spent a wonderful night at Long Branch State Park in Missouri on my way out west, and I have two, maybe three, prints dancing in my head from that one evening sitting on a tiny private beach with a Great Blue Heron for company. This is the smaller of the two that I’ve started. Brown ink is the only ink I have out here, so it’s what I’m using to proof, but this won’t be the final color. I just wanted to see how the carving is going before doing any more. I sat and watched this one single light out across the water, and it reminded me of Gatsby watching the light from Daisy’s dock. I’m not sure if I’ll try for green or just leave it white, but I’ve got a little way to go before making that decision.

This is the cardinals nest that was just outside my kitchen window this past spring. It featured prominently in my Quarantine Journal several times, but this week (long abandoned) it had to come down to make more space for my A/C unit to breathe properly. I brought it inside, reluctant to have it just gone, and realized immediately I had to do a print of it. I set it on my desk and drew it, though I added the eggs I’d drawn from life back in April. It’s been fun to have a print just push on out since I’ve been doing so much watercolor work instead lately. I’m going to sit with it and see if I want to thin it out any more, but at the moment I’m enjoying the “noise” and energy of the extra pattern. This one happened so fast it will be good for me to hang it up and look at it a while before making any irrevocable changes.

I feel like I've been working on this tiny print for ages, and today I got yet another proof done. It's not quite what I want -- the tunnel shape still isn't quite there, and I'd like more definition at the right hand side. But the main purpose of this is to do a test for doing a bigger piece, and I've finally figured out what is working and what isn't, so I think I'm ready to draw this up bigger and start carving. It was good to work out the kinks in something that was a lot less labor (and expensive material -- this was done on scraps I already had instead of a large sheet). I'm still working to get the seagulls finished, but this will be next up.

I think I’ve had “finish seagull piece” on my goal list the last three months. It’s a lot, and I’ve amazed at how much more work the larger size is. It’s also intricate, so if I see something I want to fix, I then have to figure out where exactly it is on the backward block in the middle of the swirl of motion. I also realized yesterday that I think my reading glasses are no longer getting me the clarity that they used to, so I ordered the next up strength today. Hopefully that will help. I’m also struggling to thread needles just now.

So for all these reasons, along with a general lack of mental focus, this one has been hanging about. I did a new proof the other day. It won’t have that huge white gap in the middle, but I needed to see if the color of the paper would do for the cuts in the distant water or if I was going to need another block or color. I think it will be good, but now I need to cut ripples into that whole section on the color block. The other option was to have a separate water color near the horizon, which you can see in a previous color test, but I don’t think I need it, and I actually think it detracts a bit. There’s still a good bit of way to go in carving the water and refining all the patterns around the birds. They’re too thick in this current proof, so I’ve been thinning them down. But I do finally feel that I’ve worked out exactly how I want to go about it, after staring at proofs and being unsure for a while now. That alone will help move things along tremendously. Maybe I really will manage to finish it this month.