Roosters

The Year of the Rooster is rapidly approaching, and I have spent this past week working on a linocut for the annual Baren Forum New Year’s Card Exchange. This will be my first year participating, and I am already having fun getting little printed treasures in the mail every so often.

I chose to base my image on a rooster silhouette of my grandmother’s. She is a very talented artist herself, and a year or two ago gave me some plastic templates she created for blind embossing. One was a rooster’s profile, and I knew right away I wanted to use it for my print. Unfortunately, it is too large for the card exchange, so I shrunk the image on a copier and used that silhouette as the basis for my plates.

Rooster silhouette

I’m always interested in experimenting, so I originally thought I would do a ghost-carbon thing, but it didn’t give the effect I wanted with my plates, so I adjusted the plan. (I still plan to give the ghost-carbon thing another shot for Print Australia’s SSNW—Southern Summer Norther Winter—Mini-Print Exchange, so I’ll describe the process then if it works out.) One plate was the basic silhouette of the rooster, the other a detail plate of feathers and texture. I ended up printing the detail plate in green first, which looks kind of neat and abstracted. Now I am blind embossing the silhouette over that for a subtle textural outline that you only see from certain angles.

Lino plates for rooster print

The prints are still damp enough to transfer a bit of pigment to the blind emboss plate, and when I cleaned it by printing off onto scrap paper last night, I really liked the effect. So I’m doing some incidental ghost prints as a separate edition during the blind emboss. Actually, it might be fun to try a little series of animal silhouettes using this technique.

Ghosted rooster image

It was a bit beyond the camera’s ability to capture the embossing, so you’ll just have to take my word for that one. At any rate, here is the completed print.

Finished Rooster print

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Rita and Nelson

    Julie dear, I love the rooster!!!!! although on my computer I could not make out the details. You amaze me with your talent.. Keep up your work. Love you so very much.

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