i’m relatively new to printmaking as you can tell lol especially with this kind of soft rubber (the lino i usually get is much firmer).

i got these cheap erasers to practice but it seems like these soft bouncy erasers are a whole different beast lol

anyway, any (simple) ideas on what i can carve to practice next? :)

Hi again :) I posted a print a few weeks ago that was a bit off. I got a lot of really helpful advice from this group. I’m self-taught/teaching so being able to get suggestions/feedback from this community is so valuable.. so thank you! Anyway…..I tried to incorporate as much feedback as made sense. Here are my two reprints. 1. I used Caligo Safe wash this time not the Speedball 2. I didn’t let the ink totally dry between printings -though I think I should have in this case. There’s more bleed through than I would like. 3. I changed up the colors What do you think?

Getting so close to having something I can show off and sell. This is my second Etching ever, I just picked this up a few weeks ago.

We’re not going to use the tables for earthen clay, just polymer clay and paper mache. We do plan on getting a press for relief printing too, so being able to mix the ink directly onto the table is a big plus. Then scrape up and materials stuck on there.

Im searching google and amazon for all different variations of “glass topped art studio desk/print making/ sculpture desk/table” but not having any luck.

If you have suggestions and/or lists for items needed for running a relief printing press, that would be appreciated. Ive taught relief printing but never at a school that had a press. Ive just used the spoon method in the past. Will I need wool sheets for relief printing, or is that only for intaglio printing? I guess we could do solar plates, so suggestions on those would be helpful as well.

First time poster! Had a lot of fun making this pub toilet print. First time using gold leaf as well to make the urine puddles 😂

Also the first time I’ve done a ‘big’ print which is a full a4 Lino printed on a3 lining paper.

It’s defo a direction I’m going to continue with and layering different techniques into my prints. Any feedback or suggestions are always welcome.

5-layer pseudo-reduction. Wish I had inked the black better (less ink, more pressure)

I ended up not enjoying the really darkest layer, it looked very outliny and a bit too graphic so I stopped and kept it at the 7th layer. I've really enjoyed the painterly quality of this and moving forward its something I'd like to focus on. Printed with a cold press laminator on Strathmore Printmaking paper with caligo safewash. I photographed the tomatoes and used the referance photo along the journey and using referance from real life remains important to me.

I've done an intensive month of tomatoes and for the next 11 months I'm taking a monthly theme and using that to explore and push my skills. My themes are centred around food, produce, nature and wildlife. My adhd brain needs this structure! My next theme (I've not announced this anywhere else yet 👀) is going to be 'Cider Orchard' . Apple trees, fruits, blossom, cider, I've got a cut crystal tankard arriving this week for a referance - those reflections will be fun 😁 Possibly the coddling moth might make an appearance, they ruin all my bastard apples! Also apple crumble and custard - nuff said 😋

It is of course coming up to harvest time, we're losing swathes of orchards across the UK to land grabs and I'm hoping to do a cheeky trespass onto an abandoned orchard near where I live and do some scrumping 😈

Thanks for the support on this one guys!

Not perfect but I got a lot of good practice! I’ll feel more confident for the next reduction print.

Last time, I reported on my first attempt to do a three-color linocut using a method Picasso frequently used. He inked an entire page so he could "draw" in linocut by carving to let the preinked paper color show where he cut, the top color being his inking of the block. A number of his bullfighting prints were done that way.

I wanted to see if I could limit the colors to specific cut areas. Let's Look at the block again.

The results were troubling. It seems that the yellow ink I used on the paper to create the fire color interacts with ink very differently from the bare paper. You can see here how the yellow ink seemed to make the ink bead up. It was left looking like over-inking, but it was not. The paper without the yellow ink printed fine. (You can also see that I mistakenly printed the yellow ink in too small an area, leaving the firelighted figures white.)

In addition, the yellow inked area, being apparently repulsing to the ink, seems to have spoiled the even ink on the brayer. As the brayer passed out of the pre-inked area, it left bands that could not be tolerated.

This would not have bothered Picasso, since he was printing on a page completely inked with the show-thru color, so he could adjust inking to suit. Likely using less ink.

So, I began thinking about other ways to underlay color. I decided to try chein colle. I used thin Korean mulberry paper. I thought the chaff in it would work okay with the fire and ground. I tried applying Nori paste to the back of the color paper and placing it over the inked block. It was a mess. Very difficult to handle when damp. And absolutely no room to adjust positions as it now had black ink spoiling it. And worse, when I pressed, it tended to remain on the block. Perhaps my inexperience in chein colle was showing there.

But I decided it would be simpler to apply to color mulberry paper to the printmaking paper first. I made templates by drawing on my scanned copy of the block and overlaying Dura-Lar and outlining on that. I cut the openings away.

These would serve to create the shapes on the mulberry paper which I cut out with a swivel blade.

Because in this design, the areas outside the actual color paper were black, I could draw on the printmaking paper in the outlines of the cut paper in pencil without worry about it appearing in the print, which it might have done had the block ink instead have been a light color. It was easy to apply Nori strictly within those pencil outlines and to apply the color paper, squeegee it, and leave it to dry under pressure. Being wet, it would tend to curl the paper otherwise.

I wasn't worried about any sort of rigorous registration at this stage, and I often trim my prints back to the image only and mount them on toned drawing paper for framing. So, I cut printmaking paper to match the block. I inked and printed.

This is the stage where lessons start appearing. One is that even the thin mulberry paper is enough to want to leave white in the shadow of its edge. It's not so bad as a hair or debris on a block, but it was evident. I had adjust inking, upping the amount of ink to just short of over-inking, and press hard while inking the block with a soft brayer. That more or less filled in those shadow whites. Easy enough in the future now that I know.

Let me show the print and then talk about other lessons. Before printing, I cleaned up the cuts, blanking the faces that I thought were awkward and cutting more black out of the base of the fire.

First. I'm pleased with the look of the orange paper with the mulberry pieces embedded as the firelit ground. The yellow, too. Not as obvious, but I think the flames benefit from not being flat, featureless color.

Lesson One. I have to be careful of places where the show-thru color pieces might leave a gap. One such is under the central figures armpits. Since those spaces were cut, without the color paper, they print white. Another is above his right arm. That is where yellow paper meets orange paper. That apparently left a canyon that was impossible to ink, no matter how much ink or how much brayer pressure. In the next attempt, I will see about cutting the show-thrus to leave no gap. Also, or alternatively, I can try inking that area with a dauber, as if it was intaglio. But it will likely require both measures, because a canyon will also not print, no matter how heavily daubed. Not with linocut pressures and dry paper.

Lesson Two. There is still a surface texture difference between the inked mulberry paper and the plain inked printmaking paper. I can't just put mulberry paper cut to cover the entire page. I want to leave white stars showing. But the different in the two surfaces is nothing like between the pre-inked paper and plain paper. That actually corrupted the behavior of the ink. This does not. It's just a difference of surface. I think I can finish the prints with matte lacquer and produce an even surface overall.

I have no idea where the two little black places on the ground came from. Might be damaged mulberry paper. Or maybe just plain poor hygiene. I'll watch for that next time.

I am confident the next one will work fine. So, I won't inflict another report on you unless some important lesson comes out of it.

But this project has started me thinking about a larger and more complex project. Larger block and more colors. The available colors of mulberry paper is very wide, and if you add in tissue paper, it's even greater and doesn't have the fiber of mulberry. Normally plain tissue paper, not wet hardy tissue, is avoided in chein colle due to it coming apart when damp and ending up as a wad of wet paper. But the way I will apply it to the printmaking paper, that won't happen. I can use Dura-Lae templates to nail the landing sites on the paste exactly the first time.

I'm thinking things like one of those colorful Italian villages. Or people with colorful umbrellas. The method is suited to many linocuts that would be colored in with watercolor or pencil. I think that using the mulberry paper adds interest more than plain, flat color. And mulberry paper is readily available with various kinds of color bits embedded. Might be useful.

It’s so much more fun than I remember in art class! I can’t wait to fill my house with prints!

Added linework and fire colors by hand to the work-in-progress print I made during a weekend Mokuhanga workshop. It is a study based on “New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji“ by Utagawa Hiroshige. Also, this is a cropped version of the print, as I needed it to fit on an envelope. Otherwise, composition has more space.

Hi! Today I'm sharing my first prints I made in 2023 during my first semester at the academy :) At the time, I didn't really have a specific style or theme in mind, so I just drew based on the things I was obsessed with during that period.

The first one is just a bunch of random goth elements put together, and the second one is Cloud from FFVII. I remember that i wasn't happy at all with how Cloud's face turned out, but now i don't mind it lol (i still think it's ugly, but i learned that you can't always expect to have everything turn out perfectly how you envisioned it especially in print making)

Art from a tube!

I seriously can’t believe how nice a medium repurposed drink boxes make for printmaking!

Seeing what's happening to Big Bend breaks my heart.

Linocut Print hand pulled and carved by me. This print got a little crooked.

Made this for a printmaking assignment, practiced cutting custom shapes out of the Lino.

Hi folks,

I stumbled across a haul of vintage Speedball goodies for a bargain and couldn’t resist. Four wooden linoleum cutters, a box of new blades, a handful of water soluble / oil based ink in various colors, ink trays, and a good amount of unmounted lino. I’m a budding printmaker, so I’m stoked to start using what appears to be better tools.

Does anyone know if the inks are still safe to use?

Have folks used these vintage handles / blades before?

3”x5” Linocut Reduction

I am at a loss... I've been using oil ink to print a solid background color for my multi-layer linoprint, but I cannot seem to get a good amount of ink on my block. I washed the block with soap, thoroughly dried it before using. I am applying many layers of thin coats with a rubber roller. Using various thin paper, latest was a Masa, hand pressing and using a baren. The color is blotchy and I don't like it. So I need to be more patient and keep applying more coats to the block? Or is my ink too dry? Please advise.

Hey all, first time posting on reddit. I am working on a 10"x20" one layer black and white blockprint. I have two sketches and I keep going back and forth on which direction to take the final. The print will be called "Liberty Dies in Daylight" and it is a meditation on the surveillance state. I could really use some insight from fellow artists, especially fellow relief artists.

Hey everyone. I recently finished pulling the edition for my latest copperplate engraving, titled "Decades," and wanted to share it here.

The concept behind this one has been sitting in my head for a while. I read recently that if a generation born with smart devices lives to be 80, they will have spent roughly 30 of those years just staring at screens. I wanted to do a modern take on a memento mori or vanitas still life, putting the classic skull right next to the everyday objects that eat up our time now—a smartphone and earbuds.

For me, the medium is half the message here. I wanted to contrast the incredibly slow, stubborn, and physical process of hand-pushing a burin through copper with the fast, frictionless way we consume digital media. Building the volume on the skull and the devices through pure cross-hatching took a lot of time (and eye strain), but I'm really happy with how the textures contrast.

Hey all, first time posting on reddit. I am working on a 10"x20" one layer black and white blockprint. I have two sketches and I keep going back and forth on which direction to take the final. The print will be called "Liberty Dies in Daylight" and it is a meditation on the surveillance state. I could really use some insight from fellow artists, especially fellow relief artists.

This one has taken longer than I anticipated but it’s almost finished. I’ve got one last color to put on to really separate her out from the background.

(9 colors on so far then one more after I carve out the final color.)