SOME LINO-PRINTING TECHNIQUES

During Lino Turorial 1 and Lino Tutorial 2 we briefly touched on the types of different carving you can use with lino-cutting. I'm going to expand a little on that in this blog entry and show some examples of the differences you can achieve - these will be the prints you will expect to see for sale on www.theprintingrooms.com once the site is up and running (just a little plug today!).

Firstly, when you draw your image onto the lino, you can either carve that image away, or you can carve around the image. The difference, ultimately is the amount of ink that will be transferred onto the paper once you have reached the inking-up stage. The difference in the final print can be huge, however.

When you carve away the drawing only, you will be leaving a much bigger area of the plate on which to hold the ink, giving a much larger 'background' area - we really favour this approach, as rather then getting caught up in the carving away of a large space, what you can achieve is a really free and energetic drawing. If we take the 'Flamingo' as an example, the outline was drawn onto the lino-plate first, and then we worked back into the plate with smaller amounts of detail - as this wasn't drawn in, it meant that each cut was done in quite an energetic manner, and we think this comes across in the end product. To have the larger ink area in the colour that we mixed also gives quite a nice shock of colour!

Now to focus on the 2nd technique that we have mentioned. For the 'Jungle' Series, we have carved around the image, and so there is a very different quality achieved. The image we have chosen is 'Elephant Stack'. Again, the outlines were drawn onto the lino-plate, but instead of carving the outline, we worked into the background and carved away anything that wasn't drawn on the plate, therefore leaving quite a bit of background on view. It is a much more work-intensive approach, but the end-product defines this. For the 'Jungle' series, we wanted a much more naive approach and look and we think that this was achieved. There are other techniques that can be used for lino, for example it can be etched - Keep watching our blog for new entries!