Lino Carving Basics

all right i'm gonna walk you through some of the carving basics on linoleum here you can see to start that i have a couple different drawings here i've got a drawing on this block which i've i've planned out a little bit more i've used india ink to kind of block in some major areas i mean i've also used sharpie and micron pins on this to to plot some stuff out so you can see here i can i can plan things out totally with the sharpie i kind of dictate my cross hatching what sort of lines i'm making but that's totally up to you you can do extensive planning or you can kind of approach this on the whim so what i'm showing you here is the the blade tool in your um like your basic speed ball linoleum cutter package so what this does is it gives your your other tools a spot to stop so it's not really intended for the physical carving of the block but is giving you kind of start and stop points for a line so i'm putting a start point and a stop point on this shape here so now that i switch out these tools to actually get to one of the carving tools if your tool ever gets stuck you just need to kind of tap it out and wiggle it a little bit until it breaks free and then put the the head housing back together in the proper way so that you can slide your next tools in there are little imperfections in these bits that sometimes get caught and hung up on that and that's what causes that to jam up so a couple things with carving people stab themselves really frequently with these tools and they're surprisingly sharp even though they're cute and little pink things so never ever ever carve towards your hand there's a habit of doing this because you want to brace the block from sliding when you're when you're moving this tool around and what'll happen is the tool will slip and and jam into your finger so you want to avoid this so you can make a simple little bench hook at home which is an example of like a metal one or a really simple wooden one so it hooks onto the edge of the table and then gives the block something to butt up against um and then that will stop you from putting your hand in front of the tool so if you're not using one of those it's just really important to remember that that you keep either your hand on the tool as a guiding factor or you make sure that your hand is back behind it so you can see the tool kind of slipped right there but what i'm carving right now is in between those two pre-cut lines you can see that when i get to the end of that line it kind of stops right at that that bit where i cut the with the exacto appearing the tool that kind of appears like an exacto knife and so i'm starting at the the front end of that and then it kind of naturally stops at that other end an important thing with the carving is that you think about kind of carving in in directions that support the shape and the form of an object and then you also think about the space between lines and how that creates value what your positive and negative space relationships are it's an interesting way to to have to think and and draw and make marks is because we're so used to drawing with black lines right that now you're you're drawing the white space essentially so like i said sometimes it's really good to pre-plan this if you have trouble with that what i'm demonstrating here is is kind of the way that the tool when you're carving the way the tool works so you kind of bring it in at an angle and slowly taper it up which is why you see kind of that variation in line right where the line is a little bit thicker at the start and then slowly tapers out so you get kind of like these v-shaped lines really regularly that go from thick to thin but you can control the tool in a lot of different ways and find the way that the the carving works for you and the way that mark making can work for you so you can do directional marks you can do stippling anything that's really going to develop that relationship between the black and white space to create gray where you need it to create gray and then be white where you need it to be white and black where you need it to be black so i'm using kind of the bigger tool here to to pull out dramatically larger areas um but you can also see if i just do simple things like rotating the tool right like the difference in the sort of mark that i get is really dramatic so like i said to use the bits in kind of their natural shape to your advantage in some way but just make sure that you're thinking about that that white and black space relationship so i like i said i like to use india ink to kind of plot out images and and what i like about that is that you'll get these little subtle marks and lines that i use as a kind of guide for what i want to carve out and i use like an intentionally crappy brush to leave behind some white space in the in the india ink marks or some gray space that i then use to follow to get kind of texture and um a different sort of feeling to to the drawing than if i if i was really planning it out with with sharpie or micron but the method that you use to plot out the drawing should be appropriate to the your intentions with the drawing or what sort of marks you want to make so basically i'm gonna i'm gonna carve through this and try to make sure i have a decent balance of of of my black white and grey space thinking about cross hatching three thinking about the direction and form a mark so i like to assume like if you if you ran your hand over an object if if it's a curved object your hand would make a curved mark so if you were representing that with a crosshatch line you would have a curved line that followed to really emphasize that that form you could also think about it like a wireframe what's the skeleton of something look like underneath of the the object but all all that's really important and it might be a little bit odd to get the hang of this at first but what i would say in general is don't don't try to over carve it first like if you think you want a space entirely white maybe hold off and make it like a 50 gray with some cross hatch lines and then go back and and carve that stuff out after you've maybe proofed the image because once the stuff is gone from the block there's no putting it back you're not gonna glue these little shards of of linoleum back into the block and that's why it's it's good to carve slowly it's good to to take your time until you're you're kind of used to this and then maybe your marks can get a little bit more expressive or you can carve a little bit quicker as you as you adjust to the medium another thing that helps is if if it's a warm day you could put the block out in the sun out in the sun so the sun will warm up the linoleum it's basically rubber and as that gets warm it gets easier to carve other methods you could hit it with like a hair dryer on a warm setting but you don't want to heat this so much up so much that it would it would be it would melt or it would cause some some breaking down of the material so this would never go in like an oven or anything like that especially don't put any like rubber petroleum chemicals in the thing that holds your food but what i'm gonna do here is i'm gonna carve through the rest of the image you can see as this thing kind of kind of starting to pull out but i would go through until i felt comfortable proofing this thing so the next video is going to be setting up registration for hand printing your relief

Channel: PRINTMAKING AT CSU STANISLAUS

Views: 88

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: relief printmaking, printmaking, relief, linoleum carving

Id: pv7CJZEY4Qw

Length: 9min 12sec (552 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021