--- Go to the Opening Page of the [Baren] web site ---

Continued from [ Next print begins - Seacoast in Winter]

Six weeks since the last update - at this rate, the Solitudes series will be wrapping up sometime in 2099!

What got in the way, of course, was the Gift Print season ... I 'opened' that page in late October, and somewhat to my surprise (because of all the very bad economic news in the paper these days), the print sold very well. I ran out of stock even before the 'early bird' special had expired (Thanksgiving day ...). So I had to get the blocks out and make some more. I ran 40 copies, thinking that it would be enough, but miscalculated, and had to run another 40 a couple of weeks later.

(That 'Leaping Carp' print is not an 'easy' one, as the multiple gradations on the water surface take quite a long time to do, so it perhaps wasn't the best design for me to choose from the point of view of 'time vs money', but it certainly was a good choice from the point of view of popularity!)

And then, of course I had to prepare the print for my own personal new year card. Thinking ahead to the future - when this 'private' print will make an eventual appearance on the gift page - I went a bit overboard, selecting a design that took around a week to carve, and another week to print (nearly 200 copies).

And in the middle of all this, I went down with a bout of the flu, something that hasn't happened to me in over a decade. That knocked another big hole in the schedule.

But the gift season is now behind us, my new year print is in the mail, and the flu has been completely beaten back. Time to try and catch up with this next print, before the waiting collectors assume I've given up!

As I mentioned in the previous post, my approach is going to be:
- work out a basic composition of the rocks and sea based on photos from some of my summer visits.
- transform this into a windy 'crashing waves' scene.

The first part wasn't so difficult. The volcanic outcroppings on that beach are quite photogenic, and it wasn't difficult to find/create a good composition. I had to 'trim' one of the large rocks in one place, but I think I came up with a good scene.

I focussed on one of the 'pools' where I swam during my warm-weather visits:

"My curiosity about these rock pools is quite aroused now, and I move over to the wide deep one that lies directly behind a large rock against which the sea is still smashing on the other side. It would have been instant death to attempt this a couple of hours ago, but now, even though the pool is open to the sea at one side, and the water level surges up and down as the waves roll by the opening, it seems quite safe. Using the mask, I float on the surface looking down at the bottom about a metre below me, while flying spray from the breaking surf falls like rain onto my exposed back."

It's a very interesting place, and during my visits I sat and watched it for hours. The water flows in and out, in and out, through the opening at one side, and the as waves arrive from the open ocean, water spills into the pool over the surrounding rocks. The photo I included in the previous post shows the pool:

At this point, I'm not going to show you the way that this scene has been transformed; you'll get to see that happen bit by bit as we move along.

But to get the process started, I will show a few of the block images, in their 'ready-to-start-carving' state. So far I've made 15 'separations'; whether or not that will be enough isn't quite clear at this stage.

There are three basic areas to this print: sky, water, and rock, although in many places, they overlap quite a bit. Here are the three 'base' blocks that will delineate the three areas: