Finally got around to test prints with these older carvings. I’m still being pretty casual with the prints. My pressing workflow is limited to rubbing the back of the linoleum with the bottom of a jelly jar and my ink is rolled out on a piece of tinfoil.
It is interesting how much more clearly the errors show up on prints. I don’t know what I was doing with the window carving. It is a mess. I think I kept flipping between carving the shadow and the line which resulted in completely opposite perspectives. It’s such a simple thing to know to do and yet . . .
The other basic, and yet difficult, thing to get in my head is that the print will be reversed.
This is probably the most detailed linocut I’ve done.
I realized I had nothing for the corners and just free styled the cross and corner patterns. The upper corners are supposed to representing increasingly chaotic chicken footprints. They went from ordered to chaotic a bit too quickly though but I like the idea. You can also see some red just dabbed over the black. I used a pencil to make that mess. I can sense some multi-layer prints in the future and maybe painting with ink as well. We shall see.
The progression
My current process is not the most economical.
I take a linoleum block and trace the outline in my sketchbook. That helps me get the scale right. Then I draw a bunch of possibilities, usually in pencile.
In this case, I then went over the pencil with a thicker pen to see how much detail I would lose. I’m still figuring out how much detail I can get from the combination of my skill, eyes, and the tools.
Then, I do a completely new drawing in pencil on the linoleum which I then trace again in pen. So that’s essentially drawing the same drawing four times. Good practice?
And, in the end, I add some stuff and make some stuff up as I go.
Future Prints?
