This print of the carving is underinked. It's too splotchy and the edges aren't clearly defined. For this print, the fact that it's a negative carving is a feature (the fact that the background is black and defined by the borders of the linostamp, I mean) and so I want clearly defined and dark edges. This isn't necessarily a bad print but I feel it misses some of the highlights of this particular carving.
This print is overinked. The background is very nice and dark with good lines, however the detail around the owl's eyes, especially, has been lost. This really is a loss as the eyes and area around the eyes are the best piece of the carving in terms of "good artistry," or at least what I'd call good artistry in linocarving. I'm very happy with the light in the eyes and the fine detail line shading in the area around them, and it's almost all lost here.
"Ah," says Goldilocks. "This one is just right."
Really, this isn't perfect -- no print is -- but this is pretty darn close. The right mix of detail and solid background. If I wanted I could always choose to stamp, paint, sponge or otherwise make solid black occur in the background, but I don't think that is truly worth it. I like the unevenness that comes with prints.
I tried something different for this print, I opted not to ink roll the full background and instead just print the bird, the primary focus. This is also a good print. I feel like the linocut shows well in both approaches -- full ink block and partial. I like that.
I am trying to figure out if I should get a store website.
This is my 6th in my bird print series and yet I have none of them listed on Etsy. I'm having trouble figuring out how to list them the right way. Every print is different, but every listing is a fixed price. It'd be cheaper and more efficient to have one listing for each type of print (for each bird) and just show very clearly through photographs that there can be a fair amount of variation in the final print.
I would feel better about this approach if all my print variations were the same color (presumably, black) but the thing is there are color variations as well. And some are beautiful, and definitely hard to capture in photographs.
Oh well. Just thinking about it.
The whole bird series.
Thanks for looking.
I was watching the home renovation show called "Home Town" last night, and the couple decided to do a wallpaper backsplash behind the range. They went to a local artist who did a lino cut tile about 2-feet square, and they hand-printed each of the 2-foot square wallpaper sections. It turned out lovely (you can see it in the second image in this article under the range hood), and the personality of each piece - inked slightly differently, printed a tiny fraction off from the previous one, etc - really made it lovely and "handmade" looking up close. In art school I had to sample a dozen different techniques and styles, and lino cut (cheaper than wood) was one of them... and I just couldn't wrap my head around TAKING AWAY material to leave the design intact... Even if I did 5 or 6 cuts right, the next one I'd be cutting out the line again, rather than cutting AROUND the line I wanted to keep... and toss that one out, too. The sculptor's mentality of "taking away everything that isn't the piece" is foreign to me. Just can't manage to do it consistently! But then again, when I tried to play piano I wanted the bass notes to be on the right and the high notes on the left... so maybe I'm just weird. :-)
In tag for some reason — Fourth grade — we had to do some kind of art project and I ended up picking scherenschnitte My mom likes to remind me occasionally that my teacher was very impressed by my paper cuttings. That is honestly one of the reasons I chose to go back and dabble in collage in the past few years, and I can see through your comment how the same skills can apply to print carving as well. I was never overly impressed with my own Scherenschnitte but I think that can just be how it goes sometimes. I honestly don’t overtly love this owl either — but couldn’t tell you what exactly I dislike or anything. This one — I don’t know, still just lacking a little something for me. I had some trouble remembering which to carve and which should stay, in all honesty! It definitely can be hard to trick your brain to see in reverse like that and I tend to rely a lot on light boards and reference photos.