I have been at this all day -- I did not even notice that I spent 9 hours carving and tweaking and test printing and printing. Man.
I was thinking that for that show with the deadline of July 15th I might submit one plaster cloth guy, one collage and one lino print. So today I thought I would try out these Speedball lino blocks that I have had for a long, long time. In the past I had only used the soft cut stuff and was too afraid to try the hard(er-feeling) lino blocks.
I actually drew a picture freehand today. I resized it to fit on the 2"x 3" block -- to see if I could carve the material and how small I could make lines on it. Having already tried other materials in relief printmaking class -- including wood -- this lino felt pretty good. I like it a lot. It is so much smoother than the Blick Golden-cut and it is already mounted on a heavy piece of wood. It makes things much easier.
I transferred the images to both blocks and put my blade to the little one first.
It went pretty well. I had the idea in my head to try and make the little leaves freehand directly onto the block.
Here is the print on good paper of the little tree. Wow. These lino blocks take the ink really well and are so smooth and level -- it is almost fun to print. Not bad for a first try with this material...I didn't go back and tweak the block or clean up the lines yet.
Here is the larger block. It is 6" x 8".
These are the first two test prints on newsprint -- just to see where I was at on the block.
I couldn't decide how I wanted the finished image to look -- what would be black and what would be white. I did a shortcut of what Shaqe showed us to do in class. I used my printer and and made copies of the transfer image, then colored them in with marker. (In class I would have had to make tracing paper copies.)
I ended up liking a combo of black and white.
I don't usually do so much white in an image and it was really throwing me off while I was carving. I messed up in a bunch of places, so I let the carving tell me what it wanted to do.
This is a test print on newsprint of what the carving was becoming. Not so many leaves and since I messed up the branches on the right side (looking at this print) I decided to just make that into a wider branch.
LOL -- this tree has taken on a Master Shake sort of look with those wacky eyes. It wasn't intentional, although Master Shake is my favorite Aqua Teen. The tree looks sort of startled while Master Shake acts pretty cocky most of the time.
Here is the block. I had to use marker on it at the top because I was getting too confused with the positive and negative areas and I needed to actually see where I was carving the leaves.
Detail of the carving -- some parts are reeeeally deep, some are kind of medium and some are just barely surface cuts.
And here is a close up of the best test print on good paper.
For the most part, I am quite happy with today's results. I still have some tweaking and cleaning up of some lines but I think I am done for tonight.
Now that I am not carving, I am starting to feel the aches set in...that was a long day. Time to feed the cats, too.
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