Look Out! Duck!

A nice busy weekend in the studio, and we have the finished mallard print.  The next-to-last color, a dark brown, higlighted the pattern of plumage and also brought out a lot of the vegetation reflections in the upper half. Clearly now you can see where it's going.

I really liked the print at this point, and to have left it here wouldn't have been much of a loss. However, I really like the finished look a small amount of black gives a print

Here now is the print with the block next to it.

I think the black gives the subject a lot more depth, pushing the background into a softer focus and bringing the ducks up off the page.

As this thread was about explaining the reduction process, here again is the block I started with. There's not much left of it now. This, of course, makes a reduction print edition truly LIMITED, as no more prints can be made with the block.

I began with 12, lost 3 outright, and after ispection I believe the final edition will probably be five.