Lino Cut Practise

Lino Cutting

I decided to practice the lino cutting as I wanted to practice the technique as I have never actually done this method other than in a workshop. I also wanted to test how you can make it look good rather than cheap and childish.

I decided to do my logo, therefore because it was a text I had to reverse the image so it would look right when printed. I then bought a piece of the easy cut grey lino, and then set up our stations.
We then got a wooden block that you put on the end of the work station and stops you at a certain point. Then he told up to chalk all over the back of my design and then draw over the the edges of the design to leave imprint of the chalk where I needed to cut. I then penned over the chalk as it was easily smudging and therefore I would lose my design easily.

Then I started cutting using the gouges, I used a large wide scoop gouge first to cut away all the surrounding area of the design. And then used a small V gouge for the fine thin areas and around the type especially.

Then I started to ink up the lino once I had finished we decided to share inks again so we went for gold and then Sam mentioned about colour fading. Which I then thought was a good idea. The inks are very sticky at first and take a lot of working to get the desired roll. With the gold we could roll on the x & y axis although because we wanted to see the gradient of the colour fade we could only roll on the y axis, so therefore this was harder to do. These are a few of my prints I did:

 This is one of the first prints I did as you can see you can see the pen I have used to draw the outline to cut out the lino with, due to the oils in the ink it has made it become loose and transfer with the ink. After a couple of prints the pen dissapeared, but definitely something to be considered next time.

I tried & tested different inks with gradients red into yellow making orange and blue into purple. Which I do think they made a very good look and would work very well with image.

Also, we tested gold. This is printing twice with the same ink too, to see what kind of effect I would get like a worn effect etc... I don't think it had the effect I wanted as the ink is still fulled spreaded across the surface just faced so you can see the paper seaping through.
 






Overall, I think that this process is not one I would use again as it is very challenging technique to be able to see non of the background and also you end up with cuts all over your hands. Plus, I don't think the effect it had on my logo did it justifies, I think you have to have an image I believe personally and you have to need that desired effect.