Linocut: Grosbeak with September Pawpaws

A few years ago I saw a Black-headed Grosbeak flying away out of the corner of the yard where we have our pawpaw trees. This was before the pawpaws were giving fruit, so I know it was after our peaches, and I know it got to some of our peaches, since that year I found several peaches with grosbeak-sized bite marks. Since then I haven't seen the grosbeaks hanging around (not even around the peach tree), but I've wondered: if they hung around, would they try eating a pawpaw?

I wanted to make a speculative print about this question, but the Black-headed Grosbeak doesn't overlap in range all that much with the pawpaw's native range. So I decided to make a print with the Rose-breasted Grosbeak, which is more in keeping with the pawpaw's native range. (I know--to be truly "expatriate pawpaw" I would showcase the pawpaw with the Black-headed Grosbeak, but in this instance I just decided to be unfaithful to the blog's overarching conceit.) 

Because I wanted the red on the chest and the yellow on the broken-open pawpaw to be as intense as possible, I printed these colors first, over the white paper, so no other underlying color could dull their intensity. But because I didn't want the red and the yellow to become underlying colors that would dull the intensity of the blue sky, I used my finger to apply the red and yellow to the linoleum only to the places I wanted them to appear. Then I printed the first yellow/red layer.

On top of the yellow/red layer, I printed blue, so the blue could benefit in intensity from the white paper also.

The blue doesn't quite hide the red and yellow substrate--you can see places where the two overlap.

Then I printed the green, which has an opacity that does a good job covering everything printed to this point: yellow, red, and blue.

The final layer was brown. A rose-breasted grosbeak has black feathers not brown feathers. But we don't have any black ink, so brown was to become the new black.

I did the printing and it turned out that when brown ink is layered on top of blue and green, it becomes functionally black. This is a finished print (albeit with the brown layer still wet and shiny and without signature etc) that has the blue layer at low saturation.

This is a finished print (still shiny brown with no signature) that has the blue layer at high saturation.

Here are the two prints--low saturation and high saturation--side by side, now titled "Rose-breasted Grosbeak with September Pawpaws."