Best Foot Forward #4

Way back in May I began to put a large(ish) two colour linocut together. The last post on that was a blind emboss just to check out the details. Now it is time to print…

The first colour was intended to be a creamy pale bluey green, but ended up a bit greyer than I had planned. Still, it had the right feel and on it went:

I intensified the colour on the image above just to show the print better. The actual colour is more like this one:

I left in a lot of ‘peaks’ in the blank spaces as I wanted this to be a very overt linoprint. I also adjusted the press to give a much lighter impression on some of the prints:

A couple of days later when these had dried I began the second colour run. Because I wasn’t working on my own press for this, I needed to get everything  prepared. Pictured below are the two lino blocks, a pile of printed sheets, spatulas, a roller, inks – rubine red, ultramarine, yellow ochre and burnt umber, as well as turps and rags. Oh yes, and some coffee; black as midnight on a moonless night.

I mixed up a rich brown for my overprint colour:

And got inked up and ready…

The first test pull was a success – I was very encouraged by the results and got straight on with the rest…

As I mentioned before, I left in a lot of ‘peaks’ and deliberately made patterns as I removed the lino. There are some nice combinations of marks as a result. I printed fifteen in total – here they are in the drying rack with the blocks…

And here they are:

I like the under-inked/low pressure prints too. The register was quite easy to set up and maintain too.

This was a really enjoyable process – right from the original drawings to this point, even though it was over a long period of time. I might have to think about some more of this type of project…