Articles about the art media used in this project.
As I’ve been exploring the world of hand-made printing techniques of various kinds, more and more I find myself looking at, investigating and writing about woodcuts. There’s a good reason for this, apparently!
Continue reading “Ancient Japanese woodblock set”As a rule I’ve stuck to just one-color linocuts mainly because my printing setup at the moment is fairly primitive. What I want to talk about here is going to be about woodcuts, but the same rules apply to linocuts and the process of pulling prints.
The main thing to solve when doing more than one color in a hand-pulled print, is getting the colors to line up. In any multi-color printing process, this is called “registration” and it applies to pretty much all color printing, whether it’s magazines, cereal boxes, or your inkjet printer. You know when you put a new ink cartridge in and you have to print out that one sample page? That’s so your printer can register the colors.
Continue reading “Chiaroscuro Woodcuts”I haven’t seen this method of proofing on any other linocut websites (and there are quite a few!) but it may be because I’m always trying to squeeze more detail out of a fairly “coarse” medium.
This video goes into the process of proofing with a rubbing, in order to see what is actually cut. Since the process is to do a black line drawing on the lino, then cut away everything else, it’s often difficult to “see” the cut areas clearly as work progresses. The rubbing reveals all this easily.
Continue reading “Proofing with a rubbing”There are a few materials that have been traditionally used for coating with ink and pulling prints by hand. The most common, linoleum and wood, have no intrinsic quality that makes them suitable for inking and pressing paper onto to make a print. Any flat surface will do, in fact there are many other mediums (steel plates, copper, even potatoes!) that are used one way or another for making prints.
Continue reading “Why Linoleum?”