Dissecting a painting to see how many woodblocks are needed for a print.

The original painting.

Cornbury Estate in Charlbury (Oxfordshire, UK) has long been the source of landscape inspiration to me. It covers all bases, notably old knobbly trees, swooping fields, repetitive fences, meandering river, stone bridge, pig-sty, hornets nests, birds galore, train line, and once I saw a squirrel fall about 75 from the top of a tree, splat on the ground, get up, dust itself off, look around to ensure that noone had noticed, then run off again. I digress, this is one of many paintings I've done of the area, and I'm now imagining how on earth one organises such a thing into something simple enough to print.

Watercolour painting of river running through Cornbury Estate, Rory Walker, 2015

My first thoughts are - "This is too complicated", followed by "Why didn't I just scan in the black and white line drawing when I did this and it'd be far simpler". Ah well. Let's get to work;

Step by step breakdown of the image

Here's a very rough attempt at working out how the image should be deconstructed and how the blocks should be made.

Keyline - to be printed in black

Light blue - for the sky and the river

Yellow - for trees and grass and background

Dark blue - for the sky and river

Light green - for grass and trees

Dark green - for grass and trees

Pinky purple - for background and riverbanks

Dark purpley pink - for riverbank shadows.

All of which gives this. Not a bad vague approximation.

The original image again for comparison. 

Thoughts on the separated image

So it looks like this print will need 8 separate blocks. Hells bells. I've only got 3 bits of  wood to work with currently....  I'll have to get some more. Anyway, this is just the basic print. I'd anticipate doing quite a bit of extra work on several of the blocks, so once they'd been printed once with a flat colour, printing them again with a gradient of colour on top. For example in the river I'd want to print the bit where there's shadow coming on to it with a secondary dark blue, emphasising the river bank reflection. Possibly using a redy-brown for a spot bokashi blend on the right, and a dark paynes grey or something for the heavy shadow on the left.

Next steps in creating the woodblocks for this print

First of all I think it probably sensible to find the original painting of this image. I'm assuming I still have it somewhere, locked away in a box. (If not, then I'll have to start afresh with a different one). Once I've got it, or maybe if I have a scan of it, I'll be able to take the artwork, resize it, and using Photoshop remove all the colour and tone leaving nothing but the black line art which I can print out and transfer to a wood block. It sounds so easy when you write it down like this.