Lino Print - The Finished Piece

Its been a while since I've posted and even longer since I originally started working on the Manchester United print. Last May I finished the Manchester United print which resulted in me having about 20 prints of the Manchester United Crest. I used a combination of these prints to produce the following piece:

Lino Cutting - Carving the third and final print

Its time to carve the lino block for the third and final print. The plan was to carve around the crest on the lino block leaving an outline which I will print using black paint. I didn't sketch the areas to cut onto the lino block, I just started carving. I was really just removing some of the lino block to leave the outline of the image.

Here you can see I've started carving the third print. I've left the outline of the text on the base of the crest.

I've took a close up picture to show me carving the text on the top of the crest.

It took me about 4 hours to carve the third print as there was lots of small areas to be carved so it was a slow process. Almost there...

And finally complete.

Now I'm ready to do the final print but I don't have the time right now so it will have to wait until another day.

Lino Printing - The Second Lino Print

I've just completed the second print using red paint. I realise now that I should have done some prints in different colours to experiment a little bit but I've decided to continue as planned with my 3 colour print - yellow, red and black.

As you can see from the two pictures below I put some paint down on the plastic sheet and then rolled it out until it was evenly spread.


Some people spread the paint out with a palette knife, but I find my approach works out OK. Although it takes a bit of rolling to get a nice even spread. The following picture shows my lino block after I have rolled it with paint. There are a couple of areas around the outside of the crest that picked up some paint. This is partly due to my efforts rolling but also these areas were not carved as deep as some of the others.


Once again I used a rolling pin to apply pressure to the page after I had placed it on the lino block. The following few pictures show the print as it was peeled away from the lino block.




I continued with the above process using all of the prints that I had created with the first lino cut. As I explained earlier I didn't experiment with different colours but I did experiment with different amounts of paint on the lino block. Producing prints with faint colours and producing prints with strong colours. Here is a pictures of the completed prints.


So one print left to do, that will be a black print. Basically giving an outline to the crest.

Lino Cutting - First Post

Its been 10 years since I did lino printing at school. I've decided to give it a go now. I found a few websites that describe the process. I expected there would be more information and tutorials available on the Internet but this does not appear to be the case. Here are the best sites that I found:

Link Print - Tutorial
This tutorial gives a good introduction to lino printing using one colour.

Moongold Visuals - Lino Cutting
This site details the tools needed and the steps involved but in allot more detail.

After reading these two sites I decided I'd start a blog to record my attempts at lino printing.