Day 2 of the Linocut Class

Overnight I had a think about what I wanted to achieve on Saturday with my linocut book.  As I am a total beginner, I decided to try something different with each page of my book.  My colander image was black lines and spots on a white ground.  I decided to do another simple line drawing, white lines on a black ground, of a pressure cooker.  Then a saucepan defined with a textured pattern on it, and a maslin pan with linear pattern on it.  I also decided to do a cover sheet with the words Women's Work, to see if I could get the writing correct, as the linocut needs to be written in reverse, in order to print correctly.

This is a lot of linocutting to do in one day, so I had to keep it relatively simple.  As I was working quite quickly, the style was quite free.  As there were a lot of us in the class, it was quite hot in the studio.  This meant that as we rolled out the ink of the glass, it dried rather quickly and it was easy to get little dried blobs of ink on the roller, which then left lumps on the linocut (difficult to see) and showed on the print (easy to see!).  Also, as we were working on small pieces of lino, there were a lot of fibres from the hessian backing floating in the air.  I discovered that these hairs stuck to the linocuts and were almost invisible, until you printed with them, when they became black lines surrounded by a white area in the middle of your image.  So key learning points were: don't work in front of an open window as it dries the ink and dust/grit gets embedded; cut Lino carefully and sweep up all stray fibres.

We were shown how to blend colours on the roller.  Put a tiny blob of red on the left and a tiny blob or yellow on the right.  Pick up some of each colour on either side of the roller and roll out until the ink spreads to the central area and blends to orange.  I used this when printing my title page.

I found printing in the hot classroom quite difficult.  I am just not strong enough to get a good print using the baren and the hessian fibres wrecked a lot of my prints.  I need a mechanical press to get a good result.

Having printed 4 images and a cover, I cut the images in half vertically and bound them together with  book screw in the top left and bottom right corner, so the pages rotated and you could match different right and left hand images.  I was quite careful with the image sizes so the different halves matched.  I think this went well, but as I had 2 images with a black background and 2 with a white background, I felt it jarred a little.  However, it was a good learning exercise.

I bought a small linocut set from Nick, as I think I could use this technique quite a lot.  I like the manual nature of this type of printing, and once you have cut the Lino, there are several ways it can be used.  Printing with ink is an obvious technique, but I wonder what effect I could get if I printed with glue and then foiled it?  Or printed on fabric and foiled it?  The possibilities are endless.