Completed Reduction Print

This was a labour of love. 20+ hours. Design details here. With hindsight, 7 layers was too ambitious. Despite this it turned out well for a first attempt:

This was the most successful, I also tried two other background options:

Doing this made me realize the importance of the background color. I noticed on Picasso's prints that I looked at in my research that he printed the block uncut in a background color. I made a few cuts in the background block, they seemed so small at the time but now the print is finished they really stand out. 

I think I made the shadows too big on the oranges, in particular above the oranges, that thick line at the top was not effective I wish I'd removed it after the red layer. The frustrating thing about reduction was there was no going back once I'd printed the blues layer.

Despite making samples I still had to do a bit of fiddling with the colors as I went. I practiced and observed drying times and the finished print followed these successfully until layer 5. The 5th layer, blue was not successful. I applied too much ink and the color was much too dark. This layer dried very slowly, much slower than I anticipated due to the thickness of the ink. Unfortunately I did not observe the mistakes I was making until after I had printed the whole set of prints. This layer also smudged on a couple of the prints. As this layer was too dark I then had to adjust the other colors. In particular the brown had to be darker. It was important that this was the darkest value or the shadows did not make sense. The whole print is very dark due to this.

Overall I'm pleased with it for a first attempt. Next time though, five colors max.