Finished at last! This print was going to be complicated, but I just wasn't prepared for HOW complicated. "Elsie" ended up being somewhere between 9 and 15 colors, and I was never sure if it was going to work nout. Several times I thought it might be scrapped. In the end, I only got about 4 decent prints (started with ten).
The main problem I had was that, at the start, I experimented with under-inking the block. This gave the print a very light, gauzy appearance, which I loved. The problem is, as the ink sits on the paper, it's like a butte, little flattened islands of color. When you print the next layer, you only print on the tops of those buttes, and the print area gets successively smaller with each layer of ink. By the end, those little islands have become mountains, with narrow, sloping tops. It becomes harder and harder for each color to print.
But in the end, I have depth, shadow and color. I don't think that I conveyed enough that the blue bottle on the right is actually the shadow of the bottle (left).
The figurine is a UCTCI Japan figurine from the 1960s. My wife found her at an estate sale in a big old warehouse on Main Street in Buffalo. Since finding her some 15 years ago, Elsie (named for her Grandmother) has been joined by many sisters.
