Linocut: Normal Everyday Pawpaws & Seeing Double

After our experiment at the end of January with linocut prints and pawpaws, we decided to try some more, now with a lot of experience under our belt. Here are the prints--and processes--we've worked on here at the beginning of February.

I started off with a drawing again...

Then I transferred it onto the linoleum and carved it out (this is the plate as it was when I printed the green).

Here's what things looked like after I printed the yellow.

One thing I'm running into is that the ball-point pen that I use to draw on the linoleum tends to transfer to the paper when I print the yellow. But generally I've found that subsequent darker layers cover up the pen.

Getting ready to lay down the green...

Here's the linoleum loaded with green ink with some of the targets in the background.

The yellow and green layers together.

On the same night as I laid down the green, NJ also did some green printing.

Here's her pawpaw design in the foreground. I like it a lot, in its fearful geometry.

At another point during this round, she printed some yellow onto several pieces of paper and then printed brown over the yellow, with a different linoleum block.

Here's the lovely result. The brown here is printed with the same block she used to print the green up above.

Our drying rack, some brown paper bags on top of some low quality Indonesian chests of drawers we bought from the classifieds. (They're low-quality and Indonesian, not low-quality because they're Indonesian. We've got several Indonesian items that are high quality, just not these ones.)

My prints with the yellow and green layers...

And then my prints with the final, brown layer.

A few of the final prints, numbered and titled "Normal Everyday Pawpaws." You can see that even though they came from the same linoleum cuts, they're all a little different in terms of ink saturation.

A few of NJ's final prints, titled "Seeing Double."

An Experiment: Pawpaws and Linocut Prints

For distribution during the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival we had wanted to make linoleum cut prints (linocuts), inspired probably by the style of the posters that NJ bought several years ago, from the 2006 and 2007 Ohio Pawpaw Festival (you can see a poster from that festival here). 

But things got crazy before the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival and we didn't make any linocut prints. We didn't even buy any materials to make prints.

So for Christmas we got print-making materials and in late January we made our first prints. For NJ it was the first time she had tried linocut. For me it was the first time in awhile. 

We bought three colors: yellow, green, and brown. Plus white, our prints could be up to four colors.

We started by sketching out some designs on paper to see how things would look. Here's the sketch I decided to go with for my first print.

And here's the sketch NJ decided to go with for her first print. (See if you can identify the miscalculation here that would, later, result in our biggest learning experience for the first round.)

We added the yellow and then the green layer.

And then we added the brown. Once I started printing the brown layer onto mine, we decided that we liked mine better without the brown layer, so of the ten prints in my run, I only put brown on half.

Here you can see the print on the top with the brown layer added. And below is a version of the print without the brown layer.

And here's NJ's final print. She only did five prints because once she did her first layer with yellow I realized that I had forgotten (from my halcyon days of print-making) that if you've got writing in your linocut, you need to carve the writing backwards in order to make it print forwards.

While we were letting the prints dry, I made a few additions to this painting, which we bought through the KSL classifieds from a woman who was selling paintings from a repo'ed storage unit in Spanish Fork, formerly owned by a man named Martinez, with several pieces of art with origins in Tombstone, Arizona. This painting is a lot of fun, we think, and it reminds me of the title of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Large Bad Picture."

Close-up of one with the brown layer, looking forward to the 4th Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival as you can see from the title.

Close-up of one with only yellow and green, as I was still getting my sea legs on the question of how to line up the layers, so this one is a little more off-set than I had meant for it to be.

Pawpaw Harvest 2017: The Final Tally

In June 2017 I took a census of pawpaw fruits, comparing the 2016 harvest with what I anticipated would be the 2017 harvest.

Here's the information I tabulated and predicted in the census, based on the small pawpaw fruits that were on the trees in June: 

The Shenandoah: 65 (last year's final tally: 33)--a predicted increase of 32

The KSU-Atwood: 23 (last year's final tally: 34)--a predicted decrease of 11

The Wells: 37 (last year's final tally: 13)--a predicted increase of 24

The Total: 125 (last year's final tally: 80)--a predicted increase of 45    

(For more details on 2016's harvest, see this post.)

But below, I've got the actual, verified, final numbers for you, complete with day-by-day notations on the harvest, which, among all trees, lasted from September 5th to October 31st.

The Shenandoah gave us 72 pawpaws, beginning on Sept 5th and concluding on Oct 31st, lasting for the full extent of the harvest.

The KSU-Atwood gave us 32 pawpaws, beginning on Sept 15th and finishing up just a few minutes after the Shenandoah on Oct 31st.

The Wells gave us 66 pawpaws, beginning on Sept 28th and finishing on Oct 26th. On a per-day basis, the Wells's concentrated fury couldn't be matched. And also, like I've said, the Wells was a double-pawpaw making machine (we counted each double pawpaw as two pawpaws, fyi).

So here's the final tally

The Shenandoah

• 2016 final tally: 33
• 2017 prediction: 65
• 2017 final tally: 72 (39 more than 2016 and 7 more than predicted)

The Atwood

• 2016 final tally: 34
• 2017 prediction: 23
• 2017 final tally: 32 (2 fewer than 2016 but 9 more than predicted)

The Wells

• 2016 final tally: 13
• 2017 prediction: 37
• 2017 final tally: 66 (53 more than 2016 and 29 more than predicted)

The Total

• 2016 final tally: 80
• 2017 prediction: 125
• 2017 final tally: 170 (90 more than 2016 and 45 more than predicted)

So much arithmetic in this post. Next time hopefully a little more fractal geometry, which as you'll see from the Mandelbrot set lurking on the other side of the Shenandoah's chart, is the true substrate of all pawpaw harvesting.

Halloween and Final Pawpaws

Halloween was the day we harvested the final three pawpaws of 2017. Here's the stately Shenandoah with its final pawpaw.

See here's the pawpaw.

It so happens that NJ's costume, which remade her as a pawpaw-leaf-adorned dryad, positioned her as Halloween's anointed pawpaw harvester.

She reached out and took hold of the Shenandoah's final fruit.

And then she contemplated the sweet and poignant scent of the closing this phase of the circle of life.

And contemplated.

And still contemplated.


I felt bad, needing to break her reverie, but we had more harvesting to do before we headed off to eat some scones at a neighbor house. So I went ahead and interrupted, reminding her that the KSU-Atwood stood waiting nearby...

She was a good sport about having her meditation interrupted and walked over and did the work of harvesting the final two Atwood pawpaws, which had actually turned kind of purple or brown on the branch.

Then, all over again, it was contemplation of the circle of life and its sweet and poignant scent.

After half an hour I was able to convince her to wipe the tears from her eyes and let's us go and get some scones already.

Over at our neighbors' house, where the scones were, NJ bumped into another autumn dryad, a good friend of ours.

Back home that night, I labeled the final three pawpaws and recorded them on the pawpaw harvest tracking chart.