Final Serenity Prayer Print

 

I wanted these last two layers to be transparent enough so that the words were still pretty legible. The red is hard to read through, but it was too pink when I watered it down more than this, so I went for a strong red. I enjoyed this make-it-up-as-you-go process a lot more than the fully-preplanned method, although I did have to do more problem-solving this way. Overprinting the white bones, for example. Another example of where I became overly constrained by my early choices: I'd like to have a dark blue bokashi on the bird's tail, but I'm afraid it would obscure the word "cannot" that's behind it, and one of the "cannots" is already obscured behind the red umbrella. The word "cannot" is one of the most important words to me in my re-write of the prayer, so I'm choosing legibility over a bokashi. If I had pre-planned I would have put that critical line of type a couple of lines further down. Printmaking is a very strange art form, one of the most indirect ways of making an image I can imagine and so full of constraints. But I like it!