It’s A Lino, It’s A Drypoint, It’s…

…It’s a reduction linocut AND drypoint montage!

That’s right, folks. Today I bring you (cue the Monty Python voice) something completely different hot off Little Mr. 906–a.k.a. my newest studio addition, the etching press, which I have mentioned in prior posts.

“Begonia Temptation” 2/ 7 prints. Reduction linocut and drypoint. ©Katie Kath 2023. Do not use without permission.

This printing technique is what you might call a “twofer:” it marries the linoleum block print with a drypoint etch all in one single print. Needless to say, this technique (which I discovered and read up on Belinda Del Pesco’s amazing blog of experimental printmaking) called for a strong dose of planning, patience, time, paint-mixing, and many runs through the press. (Thank goodness for that press!)

The first thing I needed to do was come up with a sketch and some idea for how many colors I dared–er–wanted to print. I transferred the sketch onto the linoleum and blocked in my chosen pigments with colored-pencil. I ended up using a total of five colors.

Everyone knows that hurdles are to be expected when trying out something new and somewhat complex. My first hurdle was dealing with the fact that you must always start with the lightest colors first when carving linoleum for a reduction print.

As you can see from the pictures above, I ended up needing to create a mask (I used plastic tracing paper) for the yellows, since there is a strong presence of blue in my image and I wanted to make sure the yellows stayed yellow while at the same time allowing some areas (in this case, the chair cushion) to turn into greens when I made the blue pass.

In the same vein, I didn’t want my blues ALL turning green, which would happen if I inked the entire linoleum plate in yellow for a first pass. Masking is great for solving issues like this.

After masking, I added the pink details with a sponge pouncer.

Here is the final color run for the linoleum print portion of this project: a dark bluish black. You can see that all of the prior colors have been completely carved away.

The finished color prints! After each color was run through, I had to wipe the plate clean and proceed to carve out the areas for the next color. I let each color dry completely overnight to prevent any smudging or ink transferring issues.

I decided to make 10 prints total. Even though I cut 15 sheets initially, I was so tired from caring for my toddler in the daytime, I decided if fate had it that I managed to totally screw up all 10 prints in the end, I just needed to regroup and try something else entirely.

It turned out that fate was on my side! After five colors and five runs through the press, I ended up with 8 good prints, which is a pretty lucky start.

Once the linocuts were complete, the final step in the process was to ink up and run a plate of plexiglass I had carved, dry-point style, back over all of the good lino prints.

Yes, what you are thinking is correct: this is yet another chance to screw up prints! (This is why I made so many prints to gamble with initially.)

This leads me to my final hurdle: lining everything up correctly.

Despite my very best efforts, my first run was not aligned AT ALL. After beating my head against the wall one evening trying to find a solution, I decided to sleep on it. The next day, it finally occurred to me–duh–that plexiglass is clear: I could simply ink the plate, flip it over, carefully match it up to each print without fear of unintended ink transfer (remember how much pressure it takes to actually make a dry-point print?) lightly tape it down with painter’s tape, flip it back over, and run it through.

Bada-bing-bada-boom: worked like a charm.

So: there you have it folks: my first lino-drypoint mashup. Overall, I’m very happy with how it turned out.

Do I want to do more of these in the future?

My impatient and toddler-weary side of me would probably prefer something that gave me a little more instant gratification. This entire process has taken me weeks to complete since my free evenings are limited in quantity and time. However, that’s not what creating is about, is it? You can’t get better at something with a one-and-done. So the answer is yes, I will be making more, at some point.

Until next time, happy creating!

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Toddler vs. Cow

This 100% happened last week.

Before you have kids, you think to yourself about how your kid would never whine, scream, freak out, or shout–I’m here to tell you that anything can and will happen with a toddler, including a simultaneous obsession and fear over cows. Yep, he still loves his little toy farm set cows, even after this incident!

I think he’ll stick with the smaller, plastic kind of bovine for now…

The Chicken Saga: THE END!

And thus ends the months-long Chicken Saga comic! Thanks so much for staying tuned through thick, thin, and the holiday season. Although this tale has been a bit embellished (ok…maybe quite embellished), the story is real: One day I got a weird note from a neighbor in my mailbox claiming they had one of our chickens in the yard! Since we had no missing chickens, I was convinced they were hallucinating, or at least mistaking an unnaturally large mourning dove for a chicken in their bushes.

Sure enough, it was indeed a runaway chicken, they did indeed name her Dolly and yes, I did make Malcolm go and grab her after his work and classes in the middle of the night!

We were a bit unsure of how Dolly would fare at first. (This is partly why this story took so long to illustrate–I didn’t know how things would turn out and I was pretty much making these comics up on the fly.) For a little while, she wasn’t really doing that well. She had clearly lost a lot of weight during her wanderings and was extremely stressed and losing so many feathers the chicken coop looked like a ripped pillowcase for several weeks. She refused to eat, we weren’t sure how much she was drinking (if at all) and she had an injured beak, to boot. She spent most days wedged up on a high roost we made for her.

Slowly but surely her hunger and curiosity got the best of her, and the rest of the flock took to her quite well, all things considered. There were a few pecking-order skirmishes, but nothing other than the usual fowl brawl that happens now and again.

Now, I am happy to say that Dolly has gained back her lost weight and re-grown her feathers, which are coming in silky, cream-white, and fluffy! Even better? She is actually laying beautiful blue-green eggs in the middle of winter!

We love our Dolly, and I am so glad you, dear reader, could take part in this saga with us.

Dolly the chicken, as of January 2023.

Eggs in the winter! Woohoo!

The Chicken Saga pt. 17

Some things are too hard to resist.

A Hopeful New Year

“Juggler Bear” – soft pastel and colored pencil ©Katie Kath 2023. Do not reproduce without permission.

Happy New Year to everyone!

I used to dislike New Years. Being such a Christmas fanatic, the New Years holiday seemed more like an anti-climactic ending to such a festive time of year–like Christmas’s sad, ugly, forgotten cousin who had a birthday that everyone felt they needed to begrudgingly acknowledge–than a real cause for celebration.

But, in the past several years, I have grown to increasingly love New Years because it is a holiday that is filled to the brim with hope. It’s the holiday of endless possibilities: you can sit down and list out all of the things you’d like to do or aspire to in the next year, no matter how wild the ideas are that cross your mind, AND you have 365 days to do all of those things! Not a week! Not a month! An entire year. There is no rush, no limits, and my daydreamer self loves that concept.

Here is to a happy, healthy New Year for everyone.

Something Other Than

I had a realization yesterday afternoon that just about shook me to the core.

I was toying around again with the idea of going back to a personal project I had shelved more than a year ago, (more on that to come), and had even hauled out my watercolors to start painting, when a distinctly and increasingly uncomfortable feeling began creeping up my spine. As I watched the painted sections dry, a sudden awareness came into focus like a developing polaroid: I no longer like to work in watercolor the way I have been. The worst part? I can’t remember a recent time when I did.

“Ol’ Paint, the Dapple Hobbyhorse” – ©Katie Kath 2022. Do not use without permission.

For an artist whose current career has been built on a certain medium, this is akin to waking up one morning and suddenly realizing that you have been in a souring relationship for many years and despite your numerous, desperate attempts to save it, it has, in fact, gone permanently south.

And, like many relationships that fall apart, there have been obvious (ignored) signs along the way. So many signs that you feel like a total idiot for not recognizing them in the first place. (Or, perhaps, it was the refusal to recognize them).

I’m not saying it’s time to chuck, along with my brushes, every single tube of Daniel Smith and Winsor & Newton out the window, but this is a sure sign I need to step back, scrub out my old painting palette, reevaluate, and ask myself some questions. Maybe I need to expand my current color palette? Maybe I need to try some dyes? Maybe I need to take a seriously long break from watercolor altogether.

The long and short of it is, the current situation of this “relationship” needs to drastically change. I don’t know what it will look like in the end, but for now, there’s a road ahead of me and I have to travel it.