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The Emperor Keyline is near completion, the Empress, with all her garden detail requires frequent breaks and is taking me longer than anticipated.
This is the press setup for printing the woodcut plates. I went to Lowes and the older fella in the lumber department knew I needed rails "to lift the rollers on the press" before I'd even finished saying what I was looking for. He must be familiar with the printing process! These pieces were already cut and price and the perfect size to fit the press bed and the perfect thickness to accomodate the plates.
I really like the smoother dispersion of the inks in the damp paper printing, there is a lot less pebbling in the larger color fields. The image on the left I laid down the inks in one pass of the brayer. In the one on the right I laid down all the colors in one pass of the brayer but on the blue I did an additional curving pass on the top and bottom edges to create a deeper blend. I feel this gives the image more depth. I'm not happy with the registration on this one. The elements in the most of the prints are in registration, the biggest problem is in the text, especially the caption at the bottom. I will probably re-carve and re-print this one when I've completed all the cards for the masters. For future pressings I'm probably going to have to adhere L-shaped edges to the sides of all the cards to ensure cleaner registration while using paper that is deckled on all four edges. That is simply not going to help with these plates since the registration is clearly off in the bottom caption in every card this shows the text registration is off in the carving.
