12 December 2005

Working the Background




This is pretty self-explanatory. I wanted the spiral of "rope" to be yellow, so I printed yellow, then carved away the spiral and overprinted in green. One problem I discovered with doing reduction method moku hanga is that I got a bleed into the yellow from the residue of blue pigment that remained on the board after I printed the feet:


This happened no matter how well I cleaned the board. Of course, that blue is pthalo blue, which is an incredibly strong color. One drop on a pair of jeans in a load of laundry can tint the whole load! Lucky for me, this area will end up covered in a stronger color, so the bleed isn't a problem on this particular print. It's something to watch for, though.

I have one more layer to do now.

2 comments:

Marissa L. Swinghammer said...

If you didn't have it blown up with an arrow pointing to it I wouldn't have even noticed the flaw. Plus, I see flaws like that as part of hand printing and embrace them. That is why I don't do repairs when my hand slips (rare but it does happen), instead choosing to work with it.

Annie B said...

Thanks for saying so, Marissa.
I have a nasty case of perfectionism. It's magnified by 20 years as a digital illustrator - with the magic "undo" command there's no such thing as a mistake! But I'm starting to like the little mishaps and quirks in hand printing. I think of them as "artifacts" of the process.