Lino Printing

After my Mono printing today I went on to do Lino printing. The same ink is used so it makes sense to do it on the same day. I decided to make prints of the same owl. however cutting this out onto the lino was much harder than cutting it out on paper!

My first one went horrifically wrong. The tools we used to remove the lino were blunt, so I kept slipping and ruining my tile. Luckily they said I could use this one as a test. The process of Lino printing works the same as aquatinting, you have to think backwards. Anything you want to remain white cut out first, then layer it up from light to dark.

This is my Lino mid process, I have already printed the yellow ink and have prepared it for the red. So far two different layers of lino have been cut out. I then cut out a lot more of the tile so that I would be left with just a black outline. This was really tricky, and of course as it is me I managed to harm myself with the blunt tool :( Sarah gave me a plaster though so it was all ok!

When I tried to align the first and second print for this one they went wrong. I couldn't understand why as I had used the marks perfectly.

Again for this one I used the marks perfectly but this print was aligned wrongly but the other way. I finally realised with the help of Sarah that the alignment marks weren't even, so even though my work was aligned it wasn't central.

These three are all correctly aligned :) The image above I really like, the ink was applied very thinly and has made the red and yellow less bright (this looks better in real life, the photo isn't very good)

I am really really happy with all of these mono prints. The process is really easy once you get your head around the fact that everything is done backwards. ('The backwards man, the backwards man, I can go backwards as fast as you can')