Following on from a previous post, I had made half a dozen orange prints of 'The Ripple Watchers' and last night continued the 'reduction print' process by carving away the same lino for the 2nd (last) colour. Black is the second colour and using a piece of tracing paper over the orange print, I drew roughly the areas which were to be black. Not a big job as there was in fact, very little. Notably the men's eye pupils and the fish's scales. Everything else in the 'suicide' process of a reduction linocut, gets cut away for good. That means for sure that there will be no extra 'limited edition' runs of this one! There is no going back to the first stage of a reduction linocut as it's all been destroyed in the process of the art. This adds extra pressure on the artist to get each stage right (as there's no seperate lino/colour layer to re-do if it's not right) but also extra value in terms of uniqueness, as the print run can never be repeated. Picasso was very fond of the 'reduction linocut' idea, but I'm sure it wasn't just because it added value to the price of the limited edition.
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