Thursday 15 December 2011

Two block linocut

Multi-block printing means you can have different colours in your prints. It also means separate plates for each colour.

Here you can see an example by my heroine, Lilli Tschudi.













Picturing which part of the image you have to carve and how the two (or more) colours will combine, and making sure they register in the right place, is complex. Fun, but complex.

These are the two plates, carved on Japanese vinyl. - I had to finish the second at home.











This is an image pinched from a painting by German expressionist artist Kirchner. (I don't like copying other artists much, though it is educational, but sometimes during workshops and work you don't have time to think ideas up.) A girl on a sofa with stripey dress & stripey socks, a little cat curled up next to her, I felt an affinity. Plus the stripes would translate well onto a print.

I I only got one plate finished in time and decided to print it up by itself in one colour, just to see. Which do you prefer?



































Friday 9 December 2011

The cruel life of dancing bears




Intaglio version of the same plate. You can see the lines of the man's face, the tambourine and his hand were carved too deeply to hold the ink when printing it as an intaglio print, so they've printed as white.















Inspired by a dream I had about chained bears ...

This was made in a workshop using Japanese vinyl, which is soft like butter after carving into lino.

It is relief printing (that is, the ink sits on top of the plate, ie the bit that sticks up is what prints, and what is carved prints as blank space) unlike intaglio printing, in which the ink sits in the lines you carve and is squeezed out by the pressure of the press.

Today the teacher showed us how to use the same type of vinyl to make intaglio prints just by inking up in a different way. I printed this bear picture up today using the intaglio method too, and I think I like it better as an intaglio print. I'll post the intaglio version when I pick it up next week, so you can see the difference.

Thursday 8 December 2011

How not to make a reduction linocut

We learned how to make a reduction linocut at the workshop. You carve away parts of your image successively (so your print run is limited) and print up layer over layer of different colours. You have to imagine your lino tool is a different colour pencil each time when you're carving it out, to keep the different colours straight in your head.

I was out of ideas and asked on Twitter for suggestions. One that I liked was "an Iguanadon giving a thumbs up like Fonzie" (see below) but this was a bit complicated as we had 10 people making 8 prints each with the reduction method, so time was tight.

















This robin was a bit simpler.










robin plate




I still cocked it up though. What colour is fairly key for a robin red breast? What colour did I do instead? Oops.



robin on purple















robin on blue