David Frazer: Mastering Linocut Printmaking

welcome to my studio here in castlemaine um i just primarily do um printmaking now and this little workshops primarily in for lino cuts and this is basically i'll teach you how i got started doing printmaking myself when i went through i went through art school as a painter and then i gave up painting after art school i discovered vino cuts and i basically all i all i had was a piece of linos a couple of some cheek tools and a spoon and a piece of paper and some ink um it's so it's pretty simple um but there's a few little bits and pieces that i can teach you i'll try to teach you um so possibly we can have a little look around the my studio here this is my my big press elvis this is my um tried to enjoy the colombian iron hand press built probably in the 1850s um and it was built in edinburgh um a lot of bits and pieces um i'll show you my you come down here i'll show you my biggest load okay this is this one here slow boat which was uh took four months of torture to cut that nearly killed me um so that was kind of the last of that style isn't my more recent work which is becoming a bit more stylized and um um all right okay so first things first you need a piece of lino so this is a silk cut liner this is mainly all the liner you get nowadays well there's that blue soft vinyl stuff which i think is awful so this is silk cut and it's that great color most art shops sell it so when you cut lino you'll see a ruler and a blade and it's best to cut it from the back you don't need to cut all the way through you just score it a couple of times and then you just snap it off and then what i like to do most people often just will cut usually cut on this but from doing wood engraving where you paint the surface of the wood black so you can see where you're cutting i decided that i was going to it was a good idea to do it with lino as well because i often do these really big liner cuts and i glue it onto a piece of board and i have to stand it up to look at as i spend weeks and months cutting the thing so it's like if i paint the surface black i can actually see what i'm cutting and you can see the picture emerging which i think makes it a lot easier so basically i just use cheap acrylic black paint and i i wash it down a bit with some art spectrum um drawing just to loosen it up a bit make it a bit runnier and then the beauty of it is when you paint it black it just becomes clearly obvious what it is you're doing so when this is all black you just imagine if you do do nothing and you just roll ink up on the surface that's what your print's going to look like and so everything you cut will be white and everything you leave will be black just remember though it'll be just it'll be mirrored so if you if you're writing text it has to be back to front but otherwise the black's black and what your cut's going to be white um so just start things up i'll just use the clear dryer also when you're cutting the liner it's not so bad in hot weather the colder it is the harder it is to cut so if you need to make it softer to cut you just can use a hair dryer just softens the lino up it makes it easier to cut you can also stick it in front of a heater or use a hot water bottle um but don't get it too hot rest and it just gets all fudgy okay then just to show you what you can do if you want to transfer a drawing onto there if you just um i'm just going to do this pretty rough roughly if you draw around your block and then you drew your your picture in this case in this case a self-portrait and then and i'm just going to cut it out [Applause] get some carbon paper or transfer paper you can get coloreds colored ones and all sorts let's do basically drawing and then you basically just have to cut down i've got these nice swiss tools i think this um foul or something p f i e l i think something like that they're really nice tools there's some chinese ones i've got in china but these shields just the cheap ones from the art shop they're pretty good i reckon you can get a packet of them for about 10 bucks and half the time i don't even bother with if i use used to use these i wouldn't even bother sharpening them they're really sharp and once they completely become blunt and just buy another packet so then basically so like i said before that's going to all be black everything you cut is going to be white so you're creating the the lightness what you're doing is creating the the light whereas what most people are normally used to is creating that doing with a black pen on white paper or charcoal or pencil and you're um creating the shadows but the thing that it's always hard for people to get their head around when they're doing lino cuts and wood engraving and relief print making is that you're actually you've got the shadows and the darkness already you're actually creating the light so [Applause] highlight on the nose it's always good to think in your picture where the where the light's coming from so if this is an apple on a table the lights you have a strong light coming from a certain point it's always good to i find from the side even to create light and shadow needs to be heated up uh main thing to remember if you're doing like if it's even if it's something like a realistic image it's all about patterns and mark making and having variety of marks so if you're doing a background or sky or whatever it's installed at something where you can make um [Music] interesting patterns and so forth just to add makes a picture more vibrant and exciting if you have different patterns going on so you have the v tools if so more for doing line work round ones and they're good for doing a little stippling i just um i always wanted to be an artist when i was a kid at school but we didn't do print making we had good art teachers but i just was just going to do art at art school that's all i wanted to do so i just figured i'd do painting i didn't even consider printmaking and then the problem was with the painting was i wasn't really into paint and i tried and tried for years but i just wasn't i basically liked the idea of telling stories and narrative things and so then when i discovered lino cuts i suited me much better with the graphicness of it and the the ability the more of a medium that was more suited to telling stories but like posters or comic strips and then i was doing liner cuts at home with just printing with a spoon which i'll show you soon and then i did just started off doing it like this and then i tried two colors and i was doing reduction prints and i was just doing them at home i didn't have a studio and then i just on the kitchen table just for the ink and then then i did two colors and three color reduction prints and then until i was doing about six or seven color liner cuts and then i did a little etching course at cae just a weekend thing and i enjoyed etching as well and then i went back to art school in 96 to do an honours year in printmaking at monash and it was a very vibrant printmaking studio at that point and there's lots of practicing printmakers there ross atkins and dean bowen jeff ricardo peter lancaster named just a few and also tim jones introduced me to wood engraving and that just um that was the most incredible thing learning wood engraving that's probably my yeah i just love the the narrative aspect of wood engraving which you could involve storytelling and poetry and make little books and things out of food engravings and then yeah so so um anyway the thing you've got to avoid doing what most people will do when they do this i'll just start cutting white outlines around everything you've got to try and if you want if you want to to do some more drawing i'll just use a pencil but don't don't just do it everything around with just white outlines if that makes sense so so i'll just quickly show you um sharpening is is in my constantly never quite sure about sharpening it's kind of tricky but um i have tried stones and water stones it's very easy sharpening these tools to which i'll probably do after time of not beveling off the the right shape or edge so i've been lately just trying to use these leather straps and just doing it regularly so they're never really super blunt that's just the polishing compound thing but there you also get the hard ones that you can rub on and then it's probably a little less damaging to it to the blade on the tool so just sort of get that angle and just run it down and just try and keep them sharp and not letting it didn't get too blunt okay finished my masterpiece thing is um probably best to take the black ink off first i don't think it matters too much but okay uh i just use a bit of meta i don't have any occupational health and safety offices inspect my studio so let's do it all right in these turps all right [Music] i don't normally um i'll just show you how to ink up first with a spoon um i'll just use this little nice cute little roller so you need a little slab of glass or just a little even a tile something really smooth and hard like glass [Music] and then when you roll you roll and spin until it's all completely flat and velvet like if you've got it the bigger the lino cut and the bigger areas are black you'll probably need a little bit more more ink than then just you don't push you don't want to push the ink into the fine lines you just want to just the ink to just roll on the surface so i'm not pushing very hard at all you have to go a few times nothing worse than the lino cut that's over inked and i've got too much pressure on the printing and it all looks squishy and messy i want things to be crisp and you just get used to practice you can sort of see the little sparkle um there and then with the paper when you're printing by hand with a spoon it's best not to use um paper that's the really thick 300 gsm making paper it's a bit i mean you can't try you can do it but it's it's a bit difficult to it's what's easier and nicer is a thinner paper and even these nice japanese papers this is a origami paper i think um i think it's like 70 gsm and when you prepare paper and print making you don't usually cut it with a knife or scissors you tear it just to keep that knot sort of a decal edge thing so just okay and what i would normally do to usually make up a registration sheet and do it a bit better than this but you get the idea so i know where to put the because you want to have your print nicely placed on the paper not just sort of all crooked or and usually and you want more room at the always have more room at the bottom than the top so you can make up a um so you can do this properly but you can sort of draw it and also work out obviously you would do this before you ink the block up anyway you get the idea so just you start off at the top pin it down with two fingers and then you drop it on and just hold it down so it doesn't move or you don't want to smudge it and then you can just hold it down firmly and just do little bits at a time and the beauty of this japanese paper rice paper or whatever it's called you can actually see the image coming through you print liner cuts through a press which i normally do do it's just even pressure over the whole thing so as one of the advantages of this is that you um certain areas of black you can give more pressure and you can see it coming through and also the other advantage of doing this way of course is you don't have to spend thousands of dollars on a big heavy um press i used to do this all the time with big at least i didn't know any better i'd use thick paper and i'd do these big liner cuts with all these colors and reduction prints and i can't believe i did it really okay probably explains why i'm so buffed you can probably cut that bit attempt as let's have a look and also a good thing about doing this way too you can um you can have a little sneak peek and see yeah might need a bit more than that so anyway it's the first proof for off in the lightest so i've got a bit crooked it's a bit speckly but you know it's a handmade it's a handmade thing it's not out of a ink computer printer thing so that's all part of the aesthetic yeah okay now here's another um little piece of high-tech equipment that i use all the time it's a shish kebab skewer and this is a good example to show you if you've got little some speckly bits that the spotty bits that haven't come out as black as you would like sometimes you i use this little you can just while it's still wet you can touch up with the little skewer also sometimes i use a dead fine line pen that's like one of these pens that's dead so i don't use the ink it's just it's just a good one for moving the ink around if there's certain spots that you want to have flat black rather than i mean the first the first proof is often light anyway and especially on a press until you get the pressure right it's best to start a bit under and then you and anyway the second roll up to the the builds up a bit more as well so um your eyes are so handsome looks just looks like a photograph now you can cancel you can you can describe that bit too that was another attempt at humor okay now uh okay i'll tell you about the ink and also also while i remember sometimes when you cut the liner cut or when you tear the bit you cut the blocks along often there's all these hairy bits around it sometimes catch the ink and come on the paper the little trick too is with um just a cigarette lighter or a match you can just burn them off probably not have a fan go anyway now the ink that i use is oil-based ink you just get an oil-based block printing ink which you can get pretty well anywhere because you've got to wash up with vegetable oil or chirps if you if you're brave it's probably not good for your brain but mine's pretty my god's plane's gone anyway pretty much so um and i use this ink now i get this ink from um holland it's a rubber based ink fans on it's a really good ink but this latest tin that i just opened really smells really badly which i'm a bit concerned about instant brain tumors but you can get water-based inks apparently they're quite good nowadays but i haven't really used them but um i can show you how to do print one of my i'm cleaning this big liner cut at the moment i'll just i'll just show you what i do okay okay all right now um i'm using an etching pressing get these metal rods metal strips just from the hardware store or the timber yard and they're actually the same exactly the same thickness as the liner which is i don't know what it is a couple of mil uh something something and i get this i'm using this paper which is your smooth paper it's just like velvet or satin my registration and printing on it everyone has this old everyone has different methods with printing money cuts on etching presses these are built for etching they're not built for doing lino cuts they're built for having the the felt blankets and then having the really really tight pressure to push the ink into the plates of the copper or zinc etching plates um so obviously that's not what we want to do with a lino cut we want it just to kiss the surface and we don't want that that sort of pressure so don't need the way i was taught to do it and i find this the best way is i don't have any any blankets or boards or anything some people will use boards and a blanket but i just use don't use anything i just got these metal strips and i lower the roller down until it just pretty well doesn't go any further on the on the runners and then just give it a little tweak you might need to adjust things a couple of times until you you get it right the thing is though you have to have the paper up in the air so you need four arms and so i'm going to get i've got my 13 year old boy lucas who's a filmmaker son who's doing this filming i'm gonna have to get my older boy who's tall and he can so i'm miss using the tape just to hold it in place and then you know you probably don't need to do this for a small binary cut but for a bigger one what happens is the paper and the block and what it sort of moves a bit if you have it just lying on the paper it sort of stretches and and then you'll get all these blurry lines especially in the second half of the block it'll you won't get crisp lines it'll be so you have to keep the paper up as it goes in and as it comes out okay just put these on just because the friction that they rolled with [Music] blisters [Music] flat so hook up a bit of a pattern so now i'm just going to put some little stenciling bits away just these are white areas big large white areas that [Music] doesn't matter how low you cut down they still pick up a bit of ink which i don't want okay so we need the paper to stay up as it goes in and stay up as it goes out so unless you've got four arms you need an extra pair of hands someone who's tall this helps um if you're doing a small lining you probably don't need to maybe not do this but if you get those blurry lines you just have to keep the paper up so for the big prints you do really need to connect the bigger line of cuts you do really need to do is if you're going to poop this way okay no just fix it up a little bit with my magic stick what i'll probably do is i'll get some masking tape and i'll put it underneath the liner where this bit is just on the edge that's a i call that packing so i'll just make a bit of lino a bit thicker because this always happens on every sort of nice everywhere else except for along this edge so if you just put some masking tape one or two bits under i'll just make that bit of liner i know a bit thicker and hopefully i won't have to do this every time but you know doesn't have to be except totally perfect okay okay just to kill a bit of time because i think we've been going i've gone too quick i'm going to just quickly show you a um i'll run a print off the um i print a winning wooden gradient off my beautiful columbian so here i have even finer engine um thinner than for the lino cuts super smooth and flat and thin and velvety spinning the roller you can sort of tell just by the sound [Music] okay wood engraving is the very old-fashioned way they used to illustrate books and newspapers it used to just be a job being a trade like any other trade would be to engrave your illustrations another job would be line up all the type from the text and now it's just for the now it's just for only retentive artists like me here dropping on packing rolling and there you have it now it's just time to clean up and that is it okay you ready yeah okay i've been informed that we're still a little bit under time um so i've run out of things too all right so i suggested i just tell some jokes but my children have told me i'm not not to do that so uh that's gonna be good this new body of work is um based on um i'm just doing wood engravings as studies and then i'm enlarging those wood engravings into big lino cuts enjoy i'm finding really fun and interesting things become a bit more stylized and less bogged down with detail the trick is it's always a borderline between if you have too much photographic um photographic reference things can become a bit sterile or overly detailed with no photographic reference dangerous of things becoming too cartoony so it's always a bit of a balance but i'm finding these really enjoyable to do and a bit less torturous to cut oh that's just plain paper that panel [Music] a big picture you

Channel: Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery

Views: 13,841

Rating: 4.9071732 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: RzaWc6m17J4

Length: 39min 4sec (2344 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021