Lino progress... and non-progress

So I managed to finish my lino prints after working on them all of Sunday night. Only to find out the prints weren't all that great, but I thought I could redo them if needed.

What's worse however, is that now I got told that the background didn't work with the image. I can see why, but I wonder why it wasn't pointed out when I showed my sketch.

The sketch.

The actual lino (touched up a bit in Photoshop).

Few differences between the sketch and lino, but most of it is similar. I lost a bit of my motivation after I heard I'd need to do it all over again, especially as this takes so many hours to make. But I decided that instead of making a new lino, I'd just fiddle around with the scan in Photoshop and see what I could do. This is the result for now.

Reworked image.

Not sure it really works yet. There's less focus on the background now and it doesn't take away as much from the characters, but it still doesn't work I think. Any ideas what I could do to improve it?

Sidenote: these are actually two pages in a book (so a spread), with the left side being kept open for text, as is shown in the sketch.

Late night working

So it is now past 4 am, and I am still awake. Why, you ask? Because I've been busy printing my linocuts. This was going to be my first real try at printing in colour. And boy did I make some mistakes!

First of all, I made the mistake of first printing the black lines and then printing the colour on top of it. Of course that didn't turn out too well. Well the black print itself seemed fine.


Then I had to redo the entire inking process, which is a bit of a pain as I have limited space to work with and have to clean my place again after every colour I print. =(


So I then started over again, deciding to make at least two versions, and doing each colour separately (whereas before I did the grey and red at the same time). Everything went fine up to this point.


But then it was time to print the black on top of the colours... And since I'm doing all of this manually, it's kind of hard to line everything up properly. Resulting in my colours being all over the place, but not where they should be.


The woman now kind of looks like The Joker from Batman. I'm hoping I can fix things a bit once I scan it and put it in Photoshop... if not, I guess I'll have to start all over again.

Let's just hope I learn from my mistakes. =P

And now it's 4:30 am and I'm off to sleep!