morally, im a fish

What it comes down to is that I was just less patient and careful than I usually am. I thought my deadline was much tighter than it actually was, and it made me go about things pretty amateurishly..

I should've sanded down the wood blocks:

There was a big dimple in the black part especially that would have been no issue if I hadn't skipped that step. It was shallow, but that's all you need to get an uneven print. I sort of fixed it by sanding it after, so It looks good now;

I tried out a water based printing ink I had little experience with and the different colours had wildly different consistencies:

I tried to do a rainbow print (gradient) for the sky and the yellow was pretty much liquid while the white was a thick paste. Thus, they didn't blend properly. I know ways to manipulate the consistency of oil based printing ink, but I couldn't figure the water based ink out.

In the end I started over with oil based ink. The second attempt was just as bad, because the consistencies were different for that ink too, and for some reason I wanted to do it real quick at the end of my work day. The third time I had the entire day to figure it out and it went fine. Besides not being able to mix the colours I wanted lol, but that's really a minor complaint. It's close enough;

The registration system I used wasn't appropriate for this project:

For my multi-colour projects, printed with an etching press press (where a big and heavy metal cylinder rolls over the block) I tend to make a folder with built in registration marks out of cardboard, so that the paper doesn't move when it goes through the press. I totally forgot about those though, somehow, and used a simple registration system I had laying around, that had two issues.

1) it was thinner than my wood block, so the paper had to curve down to reach the registration marks. idk if it makes any sense when I explain it like that, but suffice it to say, this made the registration unreliable. In the end my big brain increased the thickness of the registration system and it worked fine.

Apart from the fact that 2) it doesn't have a cover (like the folder I usually make), so the paper moved as it went through the press, even though I cover it with a sheet of felt. This was solved by holding the paper in place until it went through the press (almost put my fingers through the press a couple of times as well when I didn't pay attention, which was not ideal).