The fireflies are done and are now winging their way to Tokyo. It was hard to part ways with them, but I hope they will find good homes. I ended up with 12 good prints on the good paper; here they are:

I have more prints on the machine-made paper, but I am not sure what I am going to do with them. I told @the_ungawa that I would post a comparison:

The nice, handmade paper from Iwano san is on the left, and the Shin Torinoko is on the right. The tone of the right-side paper itself is cooler, and this shows in the print. As impressions stacked up, it seemed like the machine-made paper was a little more reluctant to accept the pigment. (I did use a lot of paste, especially in early impressions, trying to achieve a smooth texture. Maybe I could have gotten away with less paste early on to keep the paper from “filling up.”) It’s actually pretty hard to tell with my less-than-stellar photography but the version on the left is warmer and more luminous.

The back side of the print is kind of interesting. Lots of lines are visible in the handmade paper below, but the impressions are much less visible on the Shin Torinoko.

It took me 2 weeks for this run. I wasn’t able to print every day because of work, travel and evening duties. 10 blocks, 12 impressions total:

1. Cadmium yellow pale (Cotman) 2019-05-27
2. Quinacridone gold (Turner) 2019-05-29
3. Olive green (Windsor Newton) & phthalo yellow green (Grumbacher Academy), 3:1 – 2019-05-30
4. Hooker’s green 2019-05-31
5. Phthalo green and Payne’s gray, 1:2 – 2019-06-01
6. Phthalo turquoise and Payne’s gray, 1:4 – 2019-06-02
7. Phthalo turquoise and indanthrene blue, 1:1? – 2019-06-02
8. Indanthrene blue 2019-06-03
9. Indanthrene blue 2019-06-05 to darken impression #8
10. Phthalo blue red shade 2019-06-06
11. Phthalo blue red shade + Magenta + sumi 2019-06-09 to adjust color and darken impression 10
12. Sumi (dilute) 2019-06-10 for the key block.