How “A Christmas Carol” Ends

Man, I really didn’t want to write this post. I had big plans, as I wrote about in my post of Sept. 10. Create a set of charming scenes from Charles Dickens’s holiday classic as three-color linoleum prints, and do it in time to sell them for this Christmas season in my Etsy shop, which I set up primarily to try selling some of my BLEAK HOUSE prints. Ambitious but doable, I thought.

It actually started out very well. I developed my sketches into imagery that I was very happy with. I enjoyed designing the lettering with a loose but classical sort of letterform, and of course thinking about and drawing the characters was a lot of fun. I was making good progress! The key factor was time, since I was starting maybe a little late for the holidays, due to the complexity and somewhat experimental nature of the project.

Since I had been away from cutting and printing lino for several months, I was surprised and pleased to find that my facility with my cutting tools was charged up and better than ever. I reflected on the fact that the only reason BLEAK HOUSE took me five years was that I had no deadlines, but with deadlines, my work was flying.

The biggest technical challenge for me was “registering” the three colors, that is, getting them all to align with each other when you’re printing blind, with the paper face down on an inked block. Off-register printing can have a certain charm, but it should be intentional.

So I worked out a system, cutting the three linoleum blocks to the precise same size, aligning the bottom right corners with a simple jig on my workspace, and aligning the sheet of paper at the same corner, with a spacer. There was a good bit of trial and error but ultimately it worked well.

There was also the question of aligning the three drawings (one for each color) on the three lino blocks. Also a little more complicated than it needed to be, but I managed to deal with it in a systematic way. I was solving technical problems and making strides.

Then, little by little, life intervened.

I was working pretty hard on the election, as Chair of the Rogers County Democrats here in Oklahoma, and as the day drew closer, the demands on my time grew and grew. Still, by managing the time I had, the project was still live and doable. I had also found out sometime in September that I would need cataract surgery, but as it was explained, and as many people have told me since, the surgery is quick, uncomplicated, and I’d still be functional; they do each eye separately, a week or more apart. So, still all pretty good! Since we don’t do a big Thanksgiving dinner anymore, I scheduled the surgeries for the week around Thanksgiving. That would work fine.

I thought I would have the artwork done and ready to go by the first of November, but that date slipped by. Still, it was all in pretty good shape; I felt I had built in a cushion of time for myself.

On Sunday, Nov. 3, Vicki had an episode of dizziness while we were making dinner together. From past experience, we thought it might be a stroke, so on Monday morning we called her doctor for an appointment. The Doc said that if it was a stroke, she couldn’t help us in her office and to get to an Emergency Room.

So at 11:30 on the morning of Tuesday, November 5, we were in the ER at St. Francis in Tulsa, and, long story short, six hours later Vicki was checked into a hospital room where she stayed for four days of testing. It was harrowing and exhausting. I heard vaguely about the election and let it pass. For those four days I only turned on the TV once or twice. It was hard to focus.

Once Vicki was back home, I returned to my work. I was a little behind, but it was progressing well and I was ready to start making prints. The process was to make four at a time since one large sheet of paper could be cut into four art-size pieces. I decided to print the green block first, then the red, and finally the black. It can be a fraught process because everything can go perfectly fine right up to the last step.

There’s a sort of zen quality to the inking process. It’s easy to lay it on too thick, hoping for good coverage. Laying it on too thin requires several applications, but is the preferred method for good, sharp prints. I thought I’d mastered the process after doing the BLEAK HOUSE illustrations, and pulling prints, for five years.

Time and again, the green block printed nicely, and the red block also printed nicely. They were not perfect but it was good progress.

But the black ink? I’ve been printing with the same black ink, Speedball water-based block printing ink, for years. It has its ups and downs but with some effort I have gotten good results, until now.

I have always use water-based media (when I used to paint it was with acrylics, and when I airbrushed for eight years I used gouache. Both clean up with water) because my small studio space is not set up for using and cleaning up oil-based media or the solvents and smells that come with them.

This time, with all there was at stake, the water-based black ink just would not give me good coverage. The red and green paints went down nicely, although, as it goes with any block printing media, no two were exactly the same.

I made a difficult decision. There’s a line of oil-based inks called Caligo Easy-wash, that are formulated to clean up with soap and water. For years there have been oil paints specially made to do the same, and a friend of mine used them in her easel painting all the time with good results. I watched several YouTube videos on using these washable inks and of course the YT videos made it all seem so easy! Interestingly, what makes them washable is that they are formulated with vegetable oil.

I ordered the Caligo black ink with some trepidation but I had no other feasible solutions.

I will omit the details, but this highly-rated ink was unsatisfactory at every stage. The two main problems were, it doesn’t clean up with soap and water, and it literally never dries. When I noticed that the ink hadn’t dried overnight, I decided to do some research, and I found myself on a Reddit thread about this ink that apparently has a reputation for never drying. Among other things, entries in the thread recommended putting the finished, paper prints in a 200 degree oven for a couple of hours. Or just wait a few weeks, it actually does dry eventually.

The worst part was that I still wasn’t getting good ink coverage, even with the oil-based ink. And I was up against the biggest deadline of all, the Christmas shopping season! My fear was that, even if I could make one acceptable print to scan and post on my Etsy shop, attempting to fill actual orders would probably be impossible.

So I pulled the plug.

The Etsy shop is up and functioning, and two of the “Christmas Carol” images are still there, but I’ve decided not to do any advertising for the holiday season, and come the New Year, I’ll get back to the business at hand, getting BLEAK HOUSE published.

I would like to say that, all in all, this was a good exercise, except for the fact that it was a total failure. Selling BLEAK HOUSE for Christmas was never a good match, although the Etsy shop will be up and continue functioning. A friend who I asked to evaluate my items in the shop made an interesting observation, that my designs would make nice Christmas ornaments, and I think that would be doable for next year, but not as lino prints. Maybe as color drawings printed on ceramic or metal discs.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end and I promise my next blog post will be about real progress on the project at hand. I’ll be revisiting the application I started at grants.gov, researching publishers and telling you about it as I go.

Enjoy Happy Holidays and I will be in touch in the New Year. You can send me a comment at dickens@mooneyart.com