Life Intervenes - The Holidays

Remodeling portions of your house taxes your patience, add the holidays to it and it becomes soul taxing. We still managed to get the Christmas cards done though, albeit a little later than either of us would have liked. This card was a tad bit more sophisticated than last years. Last year I used one of my father's old printing blocks, used black ink and we hand painted the rest. This year I carved the block myself, we used an oil based Prussian blue for the card and then hand wrote the greeting on the reverse. In 2018 we used a black, acrylic ink which dried within an hour. However, it still tended to run when the water color paints were applied. For 2019 I opted for the oil colored ink as the original concept would have involved another painted color to be applied. Well, the damn things really took 3-4 days to dry which means we ran out of time to "paint" the other color on and the blue was much darker than I was anticipating (we tried a proof in ultramarine blue but it was a bit to "bright"). Still pleased with the final product though. Next year I swear I will start the printing process earlier. If I do a multi-colored print I will have to.