Woodblock Wednesday - "Waders" reduction block

The photo of the birds has been hanging around for a while, 6 February to be exact. Found online (but where?) - there was something about it....

First I printed the photo out quite small, and chose groups of birds to trace for a 10x15 print - but they were impossibly small. Try again at a larger size (to thriftily get two from a sheet of ho sho pad) -

The larger composition was traced onto the stained block after nori was rubbed in. I decided not to overthink this, just go for it, step by step. First step is to take out the background so that would "print" white, and the shapes would be a pale grey. Then, removing parts of the shapes so that each layer would become darker, ending up with black.

Starting to cut ... oh those skinny legs on the smallest birds! And, uh-oh, they don't follow the grain. Double trouble!

Retrace the composition with  the grain.  But the board was so big, hard to turn on my narrow table. It needed cutting to size -

As the fiddly bits of the first image were already cut, I decided to use the three small birds for a warm-up, postcard size -

A chance to experiment with the reflections and to determine the number of layers needed.

Cut and rubbed, ready for printing the first layer -