Dragonfly

I finished up the dragonfly/cattail print I started last week.



I printed all the color blocks in succession up until the grey wings (I wanted to print them last, over all the other colors, to give a sense of transparency) and stopped because I wasn't happy with how it was progressing, and slept on it. I printed the wings this morning, and it looked better. I then printed the whole black key block over everything and was extremely disappointed.

Hmmmmm......

I went back to my books on Hiroshige and Hokusai, and really looked at how they did things, concentrating on how they used black, particularly as an outline, or in this sense, how it isn't used.

I thought at first that I'd carve another black block, because I didn't want to wreck the keyblock. but i found that I can ink just the portions of the block that I need to, and with selective burnishing, get pretty much the results I was looking for. I'm going to experiment with the background colors just a bit, maybe add some orange to compliment the greens, but overall, I'm extremely please with this print!