LINO TUTORIAL - STAGE 1

So I've been promising for a while that I would post up information on lino-cutting and printing, so here goes:

LINO CUTTING TUTORIAL, STAGE 1

Right, first things first, lino printing is a process called relief printmaking - basically, whatever you take (i.e. cut) away from the plate will not print on the paper/fabric/surface - in other words, the bits that are cut away, or the negative space will be the colour of the paper/fabric used, and anything left in 'relief' on the plate will hold the ink.

Materials needed:

• a roller (you could use a brush just to start you off)
• printing inks (you could also use poster paints, acrylic paints but they will dry very quickly, so it might be best to invest in one printing ink to see if it's for you)
• your printing plate - lino 
• Lino cutting tools
• an image/ drawing
• printing press (ha! bloody expensive too, so just use a wooden spoon for now, or a japanese hand baren)
• inking-up plate - somewhere to spread the ink, so a piece of glass (don't need to tell you to be careful!), acetate, acrylic.

Most of the above you can get for relatively cheap in any art shop, but for anything you can't get or can't afford, just improvise! Apart from the above, you'll need: Newspaper (it's messy) ; Apron/ old shirt.. anything to avoid messy ink splatters on your best clothes, and finally, printing paper (you could use copy paper to test) or fabric to print on.

Step 1:

You can either draw onto the plate directly with pencil or pen, or trace onto the plate using carbon paper - to do the carbon paper method, place the carbon paper ink side down onto the plate, place your drawing/image on top and draw over. NOTE: whatever image you put on your plate will come out as a mirror image, so you've been warned with words/ letters etc.

Step 2:

You have a plate with an image on it, so now you are ready to cut - you can either cut away everything around the image, or you can cut the actual drawing itself - experiment with this; both give very different effects. To keep it simple, we've just cut away the image/drawing.

Step 3:

Once you have cut away the lino that you want removed (what you want to remain 'paper colour') then you are ready to ink up.... which will follow in tutorial step 2... hopefully tomorrow!

LINO TUTORIAL - STAGE 2