After admiring the wonderful work of Jane Beharrel who I discovered on Etsy a little while ago, I decided it was high time I started making prints myself. Printmaking is my top fiery passion, so I’m disappointed in myself for taking this long to start—better late than never! Linocut is a little bit like potato printing where you carve away at a medium to expose an image. The exposed image can receive ink from a brayer roller which creates this contrast and maybe a nice image too.
So I found a lovely rhino face, and I drew it freehand (big mistake) onto possibly the darkest lino I could have bought (mistake number two), which I then preceded to cut with the flimsiest of tools (third mistake). After the image was revealed I then slathered water based ink onto the lino (fourth mistake). Then cometh the fifth mistake of damping the cartridge paper to overlay on top of the inked lino, which when pressed together to transfer the image resulted in the most blurry, watery mess of a rhino face you will ever see. It would give you nightmares.
But after some trial and a few more errors later I got a fairly good result. For a first try outside of the luxury of college guidance and print facilities I did okay.
Hand printing brought up so many problems which you’d hardly encounter using a proper printmaking press, like alignment, pressure and transfer issues. I used a back of a metal spoon to transfer the ink onto the paper which sometimes works and sometimes leaves a patchy, faint, monstrosity. But we make do!