Reading Week - Day 2

Today I worked lots with Lino. I have made a Lino that is made out of 3 different pieces so that I can ink each piece of the plate up with separate colours. I can't show any of the images that I make from this print process but I can show the plate it self.

This is my lino in it's final stages of cut, the owl is nearly all cut away.

The problems that I had with this process were; cutting the lino itself, placing it all together for printing, and registration.

The Lino is really really thick and has a gauze backing beneath it. Cutting through the lino is fine but trying to get through the gauze was near impossible, my whole right arm went numb trying to cut it! Thankfully Neil came and helped me with the rest of the tricky bits!

I also had lots of problems when trying to place the three separate plates back together once they were inked up. You can't touch the surface because you were create imperfections in the ink, but plates don't fit back together as perfectly as they had come apart. I ended up having to shave small parts of the bird layer away so that it would fit easily into the middle. Even then I had to use a small spiked took to push the plates into place (as long as you put the took in a part of the lino that you have cut away it won't mark the print!)

Then Finally when I came to layer the images up I found even more problems. The nipping press that I used moves the sheets of paper! So even if you line it up it moves, so you have to be really really protective of the placement of the paper right up until it is under the press and ready to be pressed.