Long Overdue Print Work - Final Prints

I haven’t made an update on printmaking in weeks so here’s everything that happened before and during the Christmas holidays.

The week after the last print post I finished cutting all my lino’s and spent a day printing all of them experimenting with gradients and printing onto different coloured paper (I knew I had several options for the final book: printing directly onto the final colour, changing the background colour on Photoshop or printing from the computer onto coloured paper). I did more than 5 prints of each design trying to get the gradients right.

Here I experimented with the climax of the story, I tried printing a red to brown gradient onto white paper but also tried printing black onto a red paper. The red on white has a strong contrast but I think the black and red is also effective. The red would have worked well in an initial idea I had to have the background paper change from a light brown to the redish brown leading up to the climax. When cutting the lino I forgot to put a mask on the owl so cut one separately.

I redid the lino of the pigeon with the mask on it, I think comparing the first with this really shows the improvement of my lino cutting. This was the most difficult piece as the purple kept being almost black and it was hard to blend purple and brown. I persisted because I didn't want vibrant colours as I wanted to keep a more Baroque colour scheme. You can also see I tried different colour background paper, I thought an orangy brown would contrast with the purple, which it did, but I think I needed to work with the background colours on photoshop.

Next I worked on the scene when the pigeon sends his friends away. I wanted to use blues to show the gloom of the other pigeons and I wanted to create a gradient going to an almost black blue to emphasize this further (showing the pigeon in the brighter light) and to hint at everything going wrong for the pigeon in the next scene.

Then its the silhouette opening scene. I wanted this to be neutral so I wanted to simply have a light brown going into an almost black brown so it's like a black silhouette but links with the gradients later on.

Finally I did the last scene of a bird standing on the mask. I cut this lino further after I saw it was hard to tell the feet were there and the use of green made it look like trees. So I made the outline around the feet wider.