When hand painting a block print, the choices are as varied as your paint colors. When I began working with the flamingo, I worked to match the colors I was seeing at the waterside.....that rich salmony-pink with highlights of yellow on the head and strong darks for the distinctive bill.
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| Flamingo - pencil drawing on Strathmore 300 series mixed media paper. |
I started by tracing the rectangular softcut block on mixed media paper. Next I sketched the head of the flamingo inside those borders. I followed the same procedure to make a block print. I taped down the vellum paper on top of this sketch, then traced the original with the soft, 6B pencil. Next, I moved the transferred image to a clean location and made some minor changes before using pressure to transfer the vellum image to the softcut material.
The reversed-image flamingo became my next carving project. Once carved, I tried several draft prints, and realized there was enough open space around the flamingo head that making clean, mark-free prints was going to be a challenge. As a result, I cut away most of the excess material in the hope that prints would be clean and crisp.
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| Flamingo softcut block - trimmed; inked with Ranger stamp pad ink to pull draft prints. |
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