Lino printing

I've been playing with eco printing on and off for a year now, but have steered clear of the regular inky kind.  I did enjoy monoprinting way back when I was at sixth form, and have been tempted to give it a try, but didn't get much farther than reading a book on my kindle and feeling that it was going to be messier and more complicated than I remembered. 

Then along came Penny Dullaghan. 

This week at Sketchbook Skool, for her week in the Expressing course, Penny showed us four different printing techniques, from using ink on tracing paper (effective but painstaking), to lino cuts and oil transfer (which creates a similar effect to that favoured by Paul Klee).  Initially, I only owned the materials to try the ink transfer. I drew some pterodactyls using inktense pencils (yup, still in the dinosaur zone), traced them and set about printing them with black ink. This involves drawing a tiny bit at a time on the back of the tracing paper and quickly pressing it down onto the coloured image. This results in a gloriously grainy line, and the occasional smudge- and takes ages. I do rather love the results though. 

Pterodactyl Squadron

I'd always thought that lino printing would be hard, and carry an unreasonable risk of losing a limb (or at least cutting my finger). Plus my attempts at using a craft knife usually lead to such dubious results that I assumed lino carving would be a straight road to failure. But Penny made it look so easy that I gave into the art supply shopping impulse and sprinted over to Gordon Harris, returning as the proud owner of a lino cutter, some lino and a set of oil paints. 

I decided to try a hummingbird for my first lino cut. This was probably an unnecessarily complicated embarkation point, but also felt more sensible that the dragon I first sketched out. I had some very soft EssDee lino- which lived up to its promise of being easy to carve. SO easy that even I could do it. No people or furniture were injured in the creation process and you could even tell what it was. Next step was to use it- printing with oil paint was a messy process, but I liked the effect. 

Humminbird lino stamp printed with oil paint

Humminbird lino stamp printed in oil on acrylic

Orchid lino stamp printed in acrylic

I then carved an orchid stamp, and tried printing in gold acrylic on an acrylic background. This was less successful and I ended up touching the stamps up with my brush (the black flowers are hand drawn).  I think the roughness of the background layer was to blame, as later I got some lovely prints on white cartridge paper. 

My final attempts were made using Pitt brush pens to colour the stamps. The prints lost quite a bit of the fine detail, so were less effective than the oils, but much easier to handle!  A few dots of gold acrylic and dash of fineliner pepped it up nicely. 

One final little bird and an orchid garden and I was done for the night. Definitely something I'll be trying more of!