John Amoss


'Stalemate'

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Artist's comments ...

My son Jack at 10-months and a local park duck find that they are evenly matched in their cracker-grabbing prowess.

***

Water-based hanga on Yamaguchi hosho. Five basswood blocks, 7 impressions (in order):

  1. Black- keyblock
  2. Tan- skin, bill, feet, cracker
  3. Warm gray- foreground
  4. Med. Brown- shadows on tan areas
  5. Med. gray- foreground bokashi
  6. Blue- shadows on boy, duck, wall
  7. Light blue- background bokashi

***

Problems:

I used a much-too concentrated sumi for the keyblock. The color would offset onto the consecutive color blocks after each impression. This put me in a black mood as this was becoming more like the "Tragedy of Life"!

Remedies:

To minimize this, I let the paper dry for 2 days after the keyblock was printed to set the color and then re-wet them. Evenso, I still had a lot of problems as I had to wipe the block clean each time an impression was made. As you can imagine, this took up both time and pigment. Since the sumi was getting deep into the pores of the wood, I was never really was able to wipe all of the black off, so I had to press lightly when making an impression.

Conclusion:

I think that I probably should have:

  • (A) either used a lot less sumi or
  • (B) printed the keyblock in light gray first to proof registration and then followed up with a more concentrated black impression at the end.

Please feel free to comment on this print and who you think broke the stalemate.


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