Animal Spirits part 3

At home last night I spent a little time fixing some details on the bottle labels- lettering, proportions, etc. In the morning I brought it up to the Studio, along with all my printing supplies.  I spent about another half hour making a few more fixes, then got out my tools and started cutting.

I didn't expect it to take too long to cut the 8" x 11" block.  The piece that took the longest was the Wild Turkey bottle (the most that had to be cut out), about 45 minutes.  The other bottles went faster, and the whole block took maybe 2.5 hours to cut.  I found a piece of heavy printing paper, tore it in half, and had enough paper for two proofs.  I opened a brand new can of relief ink, and started inking.  Most of it rolled up very easily, but a little trickier around the letters.  Below is the first proof.

I think it's a good print so far, especially considering that other than gathering the information, it was only two days' work.  Good bold graphics, and I think that anyone reading the title should be able to make the connection with the subject pretty quickly.  Molly happened to wander through as I was inking and immediately got it, even though we hadn't occasion to discuss it before.  I used my gouges to clean up a few of the areas of the block that unintentionally took ink the first time and then pulled a second proof.  I'll let them dry a few days and try coloring them next week.  If I like the results of at least one of them, I'll submit it to the show.

As long as I had the ink out I pulled two quick proofs of the cats block on small pieces of okawara.  Much easier than the bottle block, with each print taking less than two minutes to produce.  They were also left there to dry until next week.