Running Out of Room

Deer, Green Heron, Wood Ducks. Linocut on Rives Heavyweight Paper by Ken Januski.
 

I used to run out of room a lot when I was painting large 6'x8' foot abstract paintings. In fact the old ones that I have still eat up a lot of room. When I turned to printmaking though I didn't really anticipate this sort of problem. However I forgot about drying prints. Once they're printed they need to dry. With a edition of 20 or so this can take up some room, especially if they're laid flat rather than hung.

Because of that I haven't been able to print an edition of the deer linocut above and below. I still had all the prints from the Rusty Blackbird and Carolina Wren laying around. They were probably dry but I still had the vague notion of adding a few tidbits of green to the print, just as the sparse vegetation indicated in the actual scene along the Manayunk Canal in Philadelphia last winter.

Finally yesterday I bit the bullet and tried some experimenting. I didn't think I could successfully print the three small areas on either of the original. So I improvised a screen out of a manila folder and cut out the three small areas. Then I printed through that onto the otherwise finished prints. The paper was a bit too thick to work as well as I would have like but basically it got the job done. It is shown at the bottom of this post. It has been very difficult to photograph this print, I think because of all the darks. In any case this photo is pretty close but still not as rich, or as coloristically unified as the actual print.

Deer, Green Heron, Wood Ducks. Linocut on Japanese Paper by Ken Januski.
 

Once it was finally printed I went back to work on the Deer, Green Heron and Wood Ducks lino. The first version printed in an edition of 8 is at top.  It's on Rives Heavyweight paper.

As I was going through my printmaking paper in preparation for it I found some old, unnamed Japanese paper. I have no idea what is is. In any case I decided to try it out in a small edition of 4 using a different color ink. All prints on this page are 9x11 inches with the image itself being 6x8.

I still have the thought of printing this as a color print, most likely reduction but possibly multi-block. I'd like to do more to make the main subjects stand out. But that's for the future. Today I wanted to make sure I had one edition in just one color. Thanks to that old paper I have two.

Rusty Blackbird and Carolina Wren at Manayunk Canal. Combination Linocut/Reduction Linocut by Ken Januski.