Happy Year of the Monkey!

Here's the carving I did for the Lunar New Year swap this year.  2016 is the year of the red fire monkey.  My monkey is based on a shadow puppet from Bali.

I used Speedball printing ink which was much slower than ink pads but gave better coverage.  It took a while to figure out the consistency of the paint and how much to put on.  I kept over inking.  Finally I started getting layers of ink thin enough to pick up details like the small lines in the eyes.