Harold Transcends Into His Final Form

We finished the prints and here is my sloth in all its glory. He's desperately clinging on to a tree, but somehow still manages to crack a smile, the little trooper. I tried to cut the texture so that it made you start looking at the head, then the fur flowed down all throughout his body, finally ending at the ends of the feet, all uniting the whole sloth. We'll call him Harold, because I'm getting tired of calling him an it, or a sloth. Harold's fur adds interest to the whole picture, and just adds a new dimension that makes the picture more enjoyable to look at. Pretty much any space that isn't positive, is negative. This sounds like a given, but it's difficult to think about when you're designing the print. You have to think in a whole new way to work with how to make a stamp. It took an extremely long time to try to cut and define all of Harold's fur, because all the black or orange that you see is cut out. I had to basically cut out everything and just leave islands. The craftsmanship could have been a little bit better, I didn't realize how deeply you had to cut in order to make it so that the ink showed where you wanted to.It was difficult to make a detailed depiction of the background due to the size of the block of linocut that we had to work with. Harold was originally going to be an arctic sloth, but the background had to be drastically simplified to the point where you can just assume he's holding onto a tree. The project was a success, although it was frustrating trying to learn how to use the cutting tools proficiently, however, after you take away the stamp and see your final print, it's cool to see the finished product and how much of a contrast there is.