For the past few weeks I have been picking away (well, carving away) a linoleum block to help a red fox emerge from it. And emerge he has, in a varied edition of ten prints. He’s unmistakably a fox, and I am proud I saw this experiment through until the end.
My ‘foxspiration’ came from new printmaker friends we met recently in Guadalajara, who don’t shy away from bold prints of animals and skulls. I was also inspired by a gorgeous Facebook photo taken by a woman who loves photographing the wild foxes that show up inher yard. She gave me the go ahead to create a print, hence the name “Leona’s Fox”.
Photograph of a red fox by Leona Marie. Used with permission.
On the heels of the Pen & Paint - Paint & Pen course I completed recently, I entered this project with the playful curiosity of a red fox. I got a little reckless though, and carved a bit too quickly around his little fox face. What I hoped could be passed off as “sly” didn’t pass inspection by my honest daughter.
“It’s really good, mom. I mean it. You did a really good job,” delivered with a hard to contain smirk.
And then gingerly, “Is it possible the fox is kind of crossed-eyed?”
Full giggle.
Were it not for the Danny Gregory course, I might have given up. Instead I plucked out a pen to see if I could correct my fox’s crooked vision. Yes, I could! And did 9 times more.
Since I had already switched lanes from a pure linocut reduction print, why not recruit some watercolour paints to distinguish the background from the fox in the forefront? For a recovering perfectionist like me, allowing this to be a multimedia print feels like growth.
I’ll be mailing one of these prints to photographer Leona. The other nine are available through our online print shop. Prints are doubled matted to pop right into an 8”x10”frame. Despite that these little creatures took a lot of time to create, they are priced at $48 each, so they find good homes.
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For readers who are interested in (or confused by) the printmaking process, I will include a few photos of how this particular print came to be. One of these times, I will slow down enough to document the entire reduction process from start to finish. It’s a big ask as I am always very excited to see what will happen with each layer of carving and inking.
1. The first carving of the lino block is only to remove what I want to stay white (the colour of the paper):
2. I made an amateur mistake here, and went too dark on my first ink layer. I spent the rest of the time trying to make up for committing to so much burnt sienna on my prints that early:
3. In subsequent layers, I tried to lighten up the background but knew I couldn’t cover up all that I had carved away already unless I was willing to introduce another carefully carved block. In the end, I used watercolour to blend the background lawyers. I would not make a background so “busy” in future. It was good to learn this the hard way.
4. Here’s what was left of the block in the end. For those of you who buy a print, this is the was you can know that there will never be more prints exactly like Leona’s Fox. The block get destroyed in the reduction process meaning that the initial layers can never be printed again as the block for that no longer exists.
5. If you are a printmaker, you might be zeroing in on the clean plastic jig. My partner Peter designed this jig for us and we made it together last week at a local maker space. Registering these prints was such a breeze that I am ready to say we have nailed registration! Registration (or, making sure the print lines up exactly each time it gets rolled through the press) is one of the toughest parts of printmaking.
Having this variable so dialled in means that I can focus on learning more about colour theory, colour mixing and layering inks.
