"Little Brother Thinks of Pimento Olives"

Here it is, the first Little Brother print! (I printed three of this color combo.) First of forty-nine, so says Marz, each in different colors.  I will aim for seven.

You can see he is not terribly complicated, and you can also see how off my registration was, and other things. Printmaking is FUTZY.

I do not know why I like such a futzy process, but I do. Maybe it's partly because I like handmade errors, and since they are hard to avoid in printmaking, errors are somewhat acceptable--small ones, anyway.
I watched an expert lino-printer on youTube who said as much:
"Don't worry about small errors; usually they are not even noticeable."

Here is how I made this reduction print.

1. Carve your image, then carve away the parts that you want to be plain-paper color--here, the whites of Little Brother's eyes and the background.

2, 3. Ink up the color (green) of the head (around the eyes), and print the green.
Then carve away the green, leaving the eyes and ear lines. Ink those up (black), and print on top of the green:

4. I realized afterward that I hadn't really needed to carve away the head, because I could've avoided it by inking up the shirt with a small brayer. But I did.
The colors were inspired by pimento olives, btw, but I'm not experienced in color mixing, so they're not very like.

5.  Then, I didn't carve away the shirt, I just inked up the bottom half and wiped off any ink above the waist.
I cut separate little lino pieces (like rubber stamps) to print the yellow collar and brown buttons.
Ta-da!