Linocut: Opossum with July Pawpaws, a First Try

We're continuing to experiment with linocut and pawpaws. Lately I've been sketching a design to convert to linocut: a possum hanging in the air while using its teeth to hang onto a cluster of unripe pawpaws. The design is inspired by some pawpaw pickin I did back during the 2007 season in Virginia. I got permission from the landowner (actually the land-renter) to harvest from a patch that was about a half acre. As I walked through and picked in mid-September, I would find ripe pawpaws that had tooth marks in them. But the tooth marks weren't fresh. They had obviously been made before the pawpaws were ripe, since the pawpaws hadn't come off the tree when they were bitten, and since the small puncture wounds had healed and left scars rather than holes in the skin.

I could imagine the scenario well: It's the middle of the night and the impatient possum climbs the tree in July or August and then slides down one of the spindly pawpaw-supporting branches, biting the pawpaws in hopes of getting one to come off. Then, failing that, the possum falls a few feet to the ground.

So I carved out the white and printed the yellow. Then on top of the yellow I printed the green.
(The print above--of the ram skull and the yucca bloom--is one I did last month, in keeping with some other, desert-themed prints we're doing, a theme that grows more organically out of the Utah soil.)

See, here it is with the green. You can see the outline of the possum's tail, before it's printed, since that's the ball-point pen coming off the linoleum.
(I'm still thinking about ways to not have that happen.)

And then I printed the brown. I took this pick while the paint was still wet so you can see the sheen.

Here are a couple prints side by side with the original drawing.

Tonight I numbered and signed the set of ten prints, titling them
"Opossum with July Pawpaws, a First Try."

For this one, I didn't get the green layer properly lined up with the yellow layer, and then when I laid down the brown layer I had to choose: should I line it up with the green or yellow? I lined it up with the green, and now the possum has a very yellow mouth.

I'm not very concerned about this since I'm folks, so I'm making folk art.

Here's the print that turned out the least eccentric (so I guess the most centric). Like I say, these are titled "Opossum with July Pawpaws, a First Try." A first try: because it's July rather than September when pawpaws are ripe and the possum is giving it a first try, and because this was my own first try in making this print. I think I'm going to make a similar print in a little while called "Opossum with August Pawpaws, Just Checking."