Traveling Riverside Blues part 8

 My original plan was to wait until next week to proof this latest block, but I had no reason to hang around the house today, I wasn't ready to eat lunch, and I had to move my car anyway after the weekly lawn mowing, so I decided to go to the Studio today and pull a print of my new block.  Besides, having a few extra days to look at the results couldn't hurt.  So I left a bit before noon (after the lawn mower showed up) and got up there in the early afternoon.  A lot fewer cars in the lot than yesterday, but I guess that's the difference between a Thursday and a Friday.  I went straight down to my space. I had brought the jazz/blues book of discs today, and selected my Duke Ellington disc, written about back on November of 2022 if you want to know more.  In any case, good music to work to.

The first thing I did was tear some paper down to size.  I knew I had enough Rives Light Weight to do the job, but not the right sizes.  For now I tore one the right size to include the lyrics, and a few half sheets that would hold the image area fine.  That's what I wanted today.  Then I looked at the block itself.  I could see right away that there were some things I could have cut, but didn't, on my standing female figure.  For reference purposes I took a photo of the unlinked block itself, so that no matter what happened, I would know what had been there.  For ink I got out the can we had last used to make Mary's prints for her Asbury show last month.  A little skin had formed under the wax paper, but I cut that off and had plenty of ink to work with.  

Otherwise, it was pretty standard printing, something I have done many times.  As an instrumental version of "Take the A-Train" played, I thought of past times taking the A Train- I knew that the A, C, and E trains  all went north from the Soho area to Penn Station, and any of those would get me back there, each stopping there before heading to different locations, and I know from song lyrics that the A went up to Harlem.  Of course you can think about such things when doing simple tasks like proofing a block.  

As always, I knew that the first proof is always the hardest one, and so I wasn't expecting much.  And I only printed the image area, as I don't need the lyrics for most versions, and this is just an early proof to see how it turned out.  The results can be seen below:

Most of it seems to be about what I wanted.  So far I overall like the light in the room and the effect of the lamp.  I think the male figure in the bed is fine.  I have a lot of issues with that standing female figure.  Too much black right now, so I will have to go back into it and find some lights, and make sure to create some separations between the hair and other shadows.  The face needs cleaning up as well, plus the areas I didn't cut yesterday.  But those are problems for next week.  My experience with this ink last month tells me it should be dry enough to cut by early next week.  Meanwhile, I'll keep studying this image of the first proof, and decide if any other changes need to be made.