"Puzzle Print"

I finally finished a project that I've been working for a while. One of my friends, Hannah Phelps had been creating some beautiful woodblock prints using plates that she cut into pieces with a scroll saw. I wanted to see if I could do something similar using "easy cut' blocks and an X-acto knife.
I started off with a sketch of beach roses and a background of hills and sea.

I transferred  the image to a 6" x 9" piece of "easy cut" and outlined everything with a permanent marker. Using an X-acto knife, I tried to carefully cut out the flowers, and separated other sections of the block. You can see the first two layers will be light blue and yellow. I have the block firmly locked into a mat board frame with guidelines to help me line up the subsequent layers.

Here you can see the results of my progress.

I continued to cut away areas in the flowers, leaves, and background, and printed layers of pinks, blues, and greens. I used Akua inks and a lightweight block printing paper.

The block ready for the last layer of dark green ink...

And here is the finished print.

As this is a reduction print, I like the way the pinks stay pink, and the greens stay green. I did a regular reduction print of beach roses last year, and I found it difficult to choose the sequence of colors as there would be some areas of overlay using these complementary color tones. The hardest part of this process was maneuvering the inked flowers into the rest of the block each time I made a print. As an experiment trying this puzzle technique, I feel it was fairly successful. I ended up with 5 or 6 quality prints out of this edition of 20, and have a better idea of what to do, and what not to do next time.