Progress on new reduction print

I made huge progress on a quick reduction print that I've been wanting to do for some time. It's an image that I've done before: a trout swimming with reflections shimmering on the surface of the water. I'm not too worried about over-doing the image, which is actually more of a theme, per say, as each new print will be so much different than the last.

I "married" two images that I have in my archives, a swimming brookie and some trees reflected on the surface of some water. The trees I shot a couple years ago on the upper Prairie while on a grouse hunt with Joe. He was wondering why I was throwing pebbles in the water and taking pictures of it...

I went ahead and transferred the married images to a block of maple, carved out a bit of white, and printed the blue background. I didn't pay close attention to how the background printed, as I wanted it to be somewhat blotchy and erratic, since it was supposed to be flowing water.



It came out satisfactory, but when I went to wash up, I discovered that in my haste to get the project underway, I had forgotten to "fix" the image - my image had peeled off with the ink.



I had no choice but to cut another block and start over.

But at least I had a start. Cutting a new block and transferring the images took up only a hour of time, so I was back on top of things fairly quickly. Things slowed down again when it came time to carve out the background that I had so recently printed:



I took a good solid day to carve it all out, and I was able to print the first color , the light colored parts of the trout, this morning:



I quickly followed with red, which actually started out pink, but since it was going over two colors already, I knew it would darken into the red I wanted:



Next came the dark green/blue of the brookies body. I decided to go ahead and print the whole block, as the new color would be dark enough to give me an idea of what the finished print is going to look like once I print the black (I'm impatient)and any mis-registration between the green and black blocks would give it sort of a shimmering look. That's my theory, anyway.



It's looking pretty good.