The top one is my colour sketch in gauche. The one underneath is the line drawing which I copy onto the blocks before cutting.

The plan is for 4 blocks, mostly in earth colours. The first will be yellow ochre, the next will be burnt sienna. The darks will be raw umber. The other block will be vienna red which is quite a dark brownish red and I want to use that to try to add some texture.

Here is the first and second blocks printed.

A few things come to mind.

1. The way its looking the picture is going to be too dark by the time the next 2 blocks are printed. Maybe I should add white to the yellow ochre. I'll think about that. In the past I've found that white improves the printing too.

2. I printed this by hand using the back of a wooden spoon. High tech stuff huh? But it hasn't printed too well so I may have to think about resurrecting my relief press which is cunningly disguised as a washing mangle.

3. The registration is not too bad. I can see a few errors. But what the hell.

Ok I know this is the wrong colour but I'll explain.

I finished the third block and I've printed 4 sheets of the yellow ochre mixed with white. I decided I would let that dry a bit before going on to the next block. But being impatient I decided to fool around and try some different colour combinations and came up with this which I thought was quite cool. You can also see I've gone back to the second block and done some more cutting.

These are all linseed oil based inks from T N Lawrence but they vary widely. Some of them are very sticky and go stringy when you try to roll them out. Other are much more liquid and don't appear to want to stick to the roller even. The earth colours are very hard. If you are printing wet on wet sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. For example I can print grey/blue on top of yellow ochre but not the other way round. Most of the inks take a long time to dry so its a pain having to wait for one ink to dry before you go on to the next. This is one advantage of japanese woodblock where you really have to print all colours fairly quickly one after the other.

I mentioned earlier about using my printing press and here it is just outside the old cottage I laughingly call my studio. Neat huh?

The prints are not coming out as well as I hoped so this evening I'm going to experiment. Some people mentioned that they use etching ink for printing relief so I'm going to try that. I had a quick go first thing this morning and it looked promising. Then I'm going to try my printing press. We'll see.

Here is the final print. I tried the press and the print quality was better but it was difficult to register so I went back to my wooden spoon.

I think its just too brown.

I had so much problem printing this that I decided to go back to the colours I had tested earlier with "The Thingy" print just to see if I could find out what was causing the problem. The colours here are yellow, red and blue and they printed fine. So I came to the conclusion that the problem was with the earth pigments in the inks. Especially the yellow ochre. Ok I know. A bad workman always blames his tools. So now you are sounding like my dad.

By the way this colour combination reminds me of some old comic book colours. I can't remember which.