Explaining the Different Types of Linocut Tools and How to Use Them

hi everyone i'm holly from hand printed and today i'm going to talk to you a little bit about lino cut when you're first starting out it can be a little bit confusing to see all the different kinds of tools that are available and to know how to use them so i'm going to just go through a few of the different marks you can make to get you started i'm going to be using a piece of traditional hessian backed gray liner today we have lots of this in a hand printed shop you can use lots of different kinds of lino um for most of these techniques but some of the ones i'll show you are specific to this kind of hessian backed lino i've stained it blue with some watered-down acrylic paint so it's easier to see the marks on it i've got some different types of tools here they're all um v and u gouges this is from the one of the beginner sets which is the five liner cutters and handle and this is one of the sets where you remove the the blade and you change the blades and fix them into the handle and they come with a set of different blades here i've got the large u blade in there i've got the v and u gouges from my japanese set which i use all the time i've also got some file tools i've got an eleven one and a twelve one the eleven one is a really tiny u and the twelve one is a really tiny veto the u gouges are great for carving even channels into the lino so as usual i've got my left hand behind the tool you don't want it in front in case you slip and you can cut yourself i've got my finger on the beginning of the blade i've got the tool resting in my hand and i'm just going to glide along the lino and you can get different thicknesses of lines slightly by how deep you go into the liner if you skim right across the surface you'll get something thinner and you'll get something wider if you go a little bit deeper a v tool like this one here i can use to skim and make even tinier lines in the lino this is great for little accurate edges you can get some really nice fine lines from that veto they've got a pointed end and a flatter end from where i've snapped off the deeper you dig with the v tool the wider it will get which means that you can get lines that start off narrower get deeper and finish narrower like that my tiny v12 one will work in the same way this one finger on the blade and this is like a mushroom handle style tool hold that in the center of my hand i can get some really nice fine lines with these tools these fine tools and especially the fine v it's gonna be really useful for um different shading techniques like hatching or cross hatching now i'm using traditional hessian backliner which means that i can get a snap off when i put my tool in rather than having to put it in and dig it back out and i'll show you what i mean by that i've got if i go for this large u tool here i can dig into the lino and instead of having to come out with my blade i can just ping up and it will break causing a nice edge where it's broken off if you're using a vinyl or any of the soft cut easy carve they won't snap because they um stretch so you'll have to go in with the tool and finish and come back out which means you can get slightly fewer styles of marks you can create some really interesting marks just by digging the tool in a little and pinging off this utool will create little use this also means that it's really easy on this type of liner to cut up to a mark and keep a nice straight edge so if i draw a line along here i should be able to use my tool to go up to it and snap off i can use a v tool to snap off as well and predictably that's just going to create little v's because instead instead of starting with a rounded end at the bottom i'm starting with a point so you can create these lovely little triangles by digging in and pinging off if you're using the traditional lino which is a really lovely mark so have a look at the tools that you've got and see what shapes you can make have an experiment with it if you've got a spare piece of lino it's always worth having a go with the tools that you've got that's the shape that that tool makes when clearing an area of lining that usually means you want to remove a large section of the liner where you don't want anything to print at all and utool is usually best for that something reasonably wide so if i find my wide tool from this set the reason we usually use a utool for this is because it's not going to create too many peaks and troughs so if we use a v it's going to create quite a zigzagged area and those high areas are going to pick up the ink with a u we can skim them off a little lower so if i just clear an area here i'm going to do marks overlapping one another so i've got a low area here you can see i've got a few peaks on that area so you can just go back in and skim them off the top i'm really not digging the tool deeply into the lino and there we are that's a much flatter area one of the things we often want to do in our designs is create circles what i like to do is take a small utool put it in the lino and rotate the lino so rather than rotating my hand i'm turning the lino that piece comes out and i've got a circle the smaller the u tool the smaller your circle keeping the tool still and moving the liner can be a useful technique to to create curved lines as well and interesting edges so rather than moving your hand all around the lino if you rotate the liner a little and turn it as you go you can have nice control over your types of lines so i can create a nice wiggly line there which is reasonably smooth just by turning the lino as well as creating dots by rotating we can produce little dots just by coming in and out of the lino with a small v now these are going to be more like ovals than circles so it depends on the kind of look that you're after choose a tool an appropriate width for the mark you want to make and instead of pinging right off at this point we're just going to raise the tool out so we get two rounded ends rather than a round end and a flat end you can use these marks closer together or further apart to create texture remember that it's the area we leave behind that's going to print so if i were printing with black ink onto white paper all of these dots would be white and the area between them would be black here are some other marks that we can make just by using those few techniques snapping off to a carved line creates a zigzag edge or a scalloped edge with a v and a u snapping off with a little v into a center point creates a star using a large u to carve two wavy parallel lines creates this positive thin line here that will print using our small u and rotating the lino but just by moving our tool a little as we go we create these little positive dots left behind rather than removing a whole circle rotating my wrist and rotating the liner at the same time creates this jagged zigzag line the possibilities are virtually endless if you have a wide variety of tools and you can absolutely experiment with what you've got as long as you're using them safely you can create all kinds of different marks i'm sure you can find loads of your own if you're a complete beginner what i would recommend you start off with is either a starter set like this a tool set like that or you can start with a small utool a larger utool and a v tool and there's loads that you can get done with just those three tools have fun and experiment we love to see if you've got any marks that you love to use that are a little unique or how you get on with your tools happy printing

Channel: Handprinted

Views: 10,533

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: linocut, printing, print, printmaking, relief, lino, cutting tools, gouges, v gouge, u gouge, relief printing, introduction, how to, instructions

Id: jYdZ4AsMVOE

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020