But now I'm back, and as I have found I am rather rusty this seems like a perfect time to talk about proofing and testing new prints and correcting mistakes. A lot of art blogs present the perfect finished article - so for a change I'm going to show you what goes wrong.
To make life hard for myself, my first new print is a Japanese watercolour woodblock (moku hanga), which demands quite a high level of technical proficiency. Maybe I should have eased myself back in with a single colour linocut.....
Anyway, I had in my mind's eye an image of a wooden Russian doll. I wanted to use the moku hanga shading to create the rounded shape and shiny varnished surface of the doll, as if I were painting it in watercolour, but also wanted to include the folk art hand painted decoration. My plan is to add the line detail to the finished and dried prints with a brush so that each print is unique, just as each hand painted doll is unique.
I have two sets of Russian dolls. I have had them so long I can't even remember where I got them, though it is likely the older and larger one was a gift from my merchant seaman brother who used to bring me back a doll from every country he visited when I was a small child. That makes it nearly 50 years old which explains why the outer doll is so faded.
My design is a sort of composite of all these dolls, and was transferred onto six different blocks for carving and printing. I printed up four test prints, each of which had different things wrong with it, which can be frustrating but is also the point of proofing.
From a distance these look like a good start, but when you get close...... oh so many mistakes....
The tricky bit here is working out what went wrong. Japanese woodblocks are lined up using kento slots cut in the wood. It should be foolproof, but pushing the paper half a millimetre more firmly into one slot than the other can create distortions of several millimetres at the other end of the block. Once I'd worked out what was going on with this block I wrote a note on it to remind myself to drop the paper into place a certain way in future.
There's no excuse for the registration mess here though, with two layers being printed out of alignment. It's one block being used for successive layers so this is purely user error and sloppiness on my part. Must do better.
This granulating effect is caused by insufficient nori (rice flour) paste being blended with the watercolour. It can be used deliberately to get an interesting texture but is not what I want here where I'm trying to depict smooth varnished wood. Must be more careful next time.
These marks around the image are where the watercolour has strayed onto the surrounding block and been picked up on the print. There are various ways to tackle it:
1. Carve away more wood, especially if particular spots keep causing problems.
2. Clean up more thoroughly around the inked area before printing.
3. JUST BE MORE BLOOMING CAREFUL.
