Printing

 I got some good news over the past week, there is a demand out there for the Robert Johnson prints.  I knew they were well liked in the exhibition, but over the past week I had three people order prints, for a total of four.  I'm glad that I am getting something else out of these, but that means I have to print them, which is some work.  I have all the blocks of course, and I have enough ink and paper to do the job, so all I need to do is go through the effort of printing them.  I can handle that, but it is a physical effort.  A bit of good news is that there is no immediate deadline on this, and I let the buyers know.  But I thought about it, and realized that the open studio event is about two weeks away, and I don't have much more I want to do to the piece I plan to cut there, so maybe this is a good time to start the printing process.  It's all by hand of course, and ink takes a while to dry.  And today was a gorgeous day, sunny and maybe in the 70's.  That meant today was a good day to start the process.   I purposely put on old clothes, things I wouldn't mind if ink got on them.  Brought along a disc I was in a mood to hear, my home burned collection of songs from Townes Van Zandt, all from a two disc set of his work, a mix of studio recordings and live material.  All the big hits I know are there, and then more. If you want to know more about him, you can find my write up on the blog in October of 2019.

First step was finding the proper block, but I was able to. Then I put painter's tape on all the edges that were left on.  The previous ink was completely dry, including that under what tape there had been there, so I removed all that. With the weather the way it is, the ink that had been in my car was plenty warm enough.  Used my ink knife to pull a scoop of ink from the can, and my brayer to roll out some fresh ink.   I put on my apron, because even though I could tolerate getting ink on my clothes, I didn't want that.  Inking the block was not too difficult, as this block had been inked before, and because that old ink was dry, it was easy to see where the new ink was going down.  Meanwhile I cut a piece of paper to the right size, and counted how many sheets I had while I had it out.  (good to know for the future)  Then began the process of hand rubbing a print:

When I was satisfied, I put the new print in the rack to dry, and blotted the block to get as much ink off it as I could.  Cleaned all my printing tools and put them back in the bag.  I'll be needing them all again in the coming weeks, but I decided one print was enough for today.  What I did today was the one Molly requested, Walkin' Blues, which she had said made her think of her daughters. She wanted it without the lyrics so that is how I printed it.  I have one like that in the frame, so this one will be #2/10 in that edition.  The proof can be seen below:

One down, three to go.