This Weekend’s Exercise

From a design for a painting created to thank my niece for looking after my pet rats several years ago. I redraw it here onto a (roughly A5) piece of lino with the intention of cutting it for a relief printing process. I look forward to doing that tomorrow afternoon. Then comes the delight of inking it up and taking prints on my new Acme wringer printing press.

It’s my first stab at a reductive linocut print:

Started by cutting out white areas such as clouds, the Dreamer’s face hands and feet as well as outlines. Then I printed in yellow water based ink:

I made up a jig to align plate and paper up centrally and so that I could add another colour more or less in the same position after a few more cuts into the plate:

There is perhaps a little too much going on in this pic. It may well have benefitted from a few blank areas just to give the eyes a rest and emphasise the flying figure as the real focal point. But otherwise I’m happy with the result.

Update:

Monday’s efforts after a hard day’s work and a few cuts into the plate:

I thought I might use the pink and green prints on card to collage areas such as the sky and fields (onto the yellow card) in pink and green respectively. Not sure yet. I’d end up with one image instead of three. Perhaps I could hand finish all three using coloured pencil crayon?

The pink print is the least successful due to ink falling into the cut area therefore obscuring the pattern on the dress. This was due to my not cleaning the plate between prints. Lesson learned. I shall experiment with coloured pencil on this print first, so if it’s spoiled as a result it’s no great loss.

References:

Walker. M (2020) The Dreamer. [Acrylic on 40cm x 60cm canvas]