Printmaking.

I've been working at the gallery for just under a year now and I've finally got around to re-investing into some new printmaking equipment, in particular, Linocut. I dabbled in this quite a lot a few years ago but my interests at the time made me venture elsewhere. It's a very physical and practical process which is probably why I like it so much, very hands on. I decided to do a few test prints to get the juices flowing and see where it'll take me. Aesthetically, I would like to step away from my current style of illustration for this in the sense that I feel a new method deserves a new approach. As for a theme, I would like to focus on animals, foxes in particular and maybe hares. I'd like to create a few pieces that imply a narrative, so that they look like they've been torn out of a book explaining a moment in a story.

Firstly, the Lino pieces I carved (In the past I've found that the piece of linoleum can often look much nicer by itself after several prints than the prints do themselves..) :

Progression of tests, just using black:

This one isn't anything amazing by any account, I wanted to play around with a sort of repetition/tessellation look, it was a little rushed.

This test print is the 'implied narrative' I'd like to go for, the imagery is nice but the composition can be better, it can be a little bit more open.

First print isn't great, poor ink spread. 

The second one, a part of me really likes this as there's decent ink spread but it isn't perfect, a rough aesthetic. 

The third one is a good print in the sense of solid colour which Lino and block printing are all about. Problem with this is that the carving has to be perfect, you notice the imperfections a lot more in this print than the one previous which can pull it off quite well. For example, look at the misshapen moon and the mountain tops third from left and third & fifth from right, it just looks scruffy.

A fairly okay test run, I'm looking into doing multiple colours but need to figure out which one of two possible techniques can work out best. I either have to cut a number of separate lino slabs depending on the number of colours I want, or use the same piece of lino but cut away into it after each colour is done, but doing this will mean that it will be unusable when I'm finished with it. Hmmm.

TTFN