Smoking Figure part 37

After a couple of days devoted to other aspects of life, I was able to get into the Studio for a few hours late this afternoon, with the goal of finishing the cutting of the block. Most of that time was spent cutting out the remaining bricks (left side), shown below. Because this area is meant to be a little darker than the bricks on the other side, I cut all of them with the same small dot pattern, instead of the variety of marks found on the right. However, even as I was cutting it, I had my doubts about how this would look. Then I moved onto a few other things. At the top of the block (see above) I added a few vertical lines into the solid dark head reflection to break that up a bit, and decided to cut a gray tone in the irises of the eyes.

Toward the bottom of the block, I trimmed a little of the gray tone to the left of the figure, just making it a tiny bit lighter. After that I was tempted to try printing a proof, but at this size it might take hours, so I decided to do a rubbing of the whole block instead, using 3 sheets from newsprint pad.

You only get so much information from a rubbing, at best just seeing some basic light and dark compositional breakdown, and the photo above shows even less than can be seen in person. The pattern of the newly cut bricks looked to be simple polka dots, very different from the other bricks- it would be darker as intended, but I'm not comfortable with the difference in texture. So tomorrow I'll spend a few minutes to cut them out a little more, using just the small tool I used tonight, but making marks more like the other bricks. Then I'll pull a proof and either make a few corrections, or if I like it as it is, pull a second proof.