Some cards...

I took a class on my birthday from Molly Hashimoto, a print artist who's work I admire greatly... The class was relief printing (lino block) combined with water color. My goal was to create something quickly and get feedback before I went on vacation!

Photo, drawing, 
drawing transferred to block

I settled on a photo of the Ziggle... Carved in the rubbery Speedball speedycut block.  I don't happen to like this material; I feel like I don't have much control, and in fact struggled to get the lines around the eyes correct (I finally fixed them with a Sharpie). I also gouged out too deep of a line on one of the whiskers. After some reflection, and thinking about how Molly carved in her demo, I think my issue is that I'm going too deep. 

Colorized. Molly suggested I tint the mouth pink
and add some shading with blue (bottom right);
I don't have the water color skills for the shading

Here it is colorized; I fixed a section of the nose and drew in the right pupil by Sharpie. It's printed on watercolor paper or postcard (whatever I had) with a water soluble oil based ink, then watercolored with leftovers from my water color class. The eye color is pretty close to Zig's and I prefer the bluer green in the background. It definately captures his character, and I feel it's got a rough feeling of the old Kabuki posters... The one on the left is affixed to a card. I'm ridiculously pleased with these. 

I also printed up a few more frogs, and some of the dancers I'd copied from a 4,000 year old (chalcolithic) vase from Iran... Looking forward to carving some more!

Things that work:

• Putting a border around the print frames it and prevents some of the carving chatter marks. Breaking the border with an element of the picture can be effective.
• Carving deep on the speedy cuts doesn't work, but carving shallow might be fun to experiment with. I have colored ink; Molly uses almost exclusively black.
• Need to wait for the ink to dry to water color; 2 days seems good (depending on weather).
• A drying rack is a good idea.
• I ripped the paper which give fun edges, but I didn't rip all sides; maybe rethink this, or use the paper cutter for straighter sides. It might have been easier to use paper that was larger than I needed, I cut them pretty close.

And a quick note... the Cowl is done, the runners are done. No photos of them yet.