lino print process post

So I Am Carving Another Lino Block. big surprise. i love making linoleum prints more than like 90% of other media but it’s a difficult thing to do properly when one doesn’t have access to things such as printing presses and brayers at deserres cost, ahem, Thirty Dollars. i am not paying Thirty Dollars for a glorified rolling pin thank you very much. heck it does hurt me to pay a gazillion bucks for lino blocks to begin with but unfortunately i’ve not worked out a way to get around that business expense. if anyone knows a place in canada with cheaper options lmk.

anyway i wanted to do a big boy this time around and the largest options at the deserres were 9'“x12” which frankly wasn’t cutting it. so i have jammed two of them together, like so:

they’re just taped on the back side with regular packing tape for now. i figure when i print ‘em it’ll be easy enough to keep them flush. if it ends up being hard, well, that’s a lesson learned i guess and i can attach them another way.

i did a couple preliminary sketches of the design before i drew it onto the blocks proper. you can see in a couple corners i’m not yet sure what to put in— originally they were going to be lutes, but that doesn’t really jive with the overall theme of, i guess, Tranquility In The Face Of Violence. i might just do more dogs or something subtly threatening.

a n y w a y! i decided for the middle panel to go for the more annoying but also much more striking look of white background w/ black outline around white fill, which is deeply tricky to do nicely when you’re going for relatively similar width lines. so i carved all the thin lines out first, then went back with my larger u gouge and got all the solid areas. had to take a break because i am still “recovering” from “surgery” or whatever but you can see where i’m going.

the bottom and top panels are going to be dark; the sides are going to have a sort of faux-argyle pattern going on. it’ll be fun!

okay that’s all i have to report byyyeeee