Chipping away

Years ago, D introduced me to the fabulousness that is lino cutting. We stocked up on huge sheets of linoleum a while back and we both dip into our stash from time to time. It's perfect for when you want to use a specific drawing over and over again on different surfaces, so we usually use our lino cuts for card making.

This season I'm planning on branching out into fabric printing, so I whipped up a couple of quick linocuts for that purpose.



Here is one of the finished blocks, with a quick test print. The actual prints will look better, because I use an ink roller to get more coverage. For test prints, I simply use a stamp pad and a piece of paper. The test print shows me what adjustments need to be made to finalize and polish up the linocut before I use it on anything important.

The process is pretty simple. You pick a picture you want to carve (it has to be a reverse image, so keep that in mind) or you can draw directly on the linoleum. My drawing skills are sadly lacking, so for this one I just took a picture of our silverware, reduced it to a shadow image in Photoshop, and adjusted the size. To transfer the image, I slipped a piece of carbon paper between the print and the lino and then traced the image. The carbon paper lets your lines show through on the lino, so you have something to work with. Then you go to town with the cutting tools. We have an amazing set of Japanese cutting tools, which I can't find online, sadly, but these ones would work fine. A word of caution - it is very easy to slip and cut yourself, so work carefully. We buy unmounted lino because it is cheaper, and then D glues it to scrap pieces of wood to make it easier to print with, but you can buy premounted lino if you prefer.