Linocut Watercolour Demo

exploring and playing with different mediums is such an essential part of being a creator i'm carol mcquaid i'm an artist working primarily in print making and painting in this tutorial i'm going to walk you through a process that incorporates both including some options for different price points and artistic effect you're going for we'll go over the basics of how to design what makes a good composition specifically for linocut whether you're drawing in a sketchbook or using a tablet in my case i'll be using an ipad and an apple pencil we'll look at how to take that design and transfer it onto a linoleum block we'll talk about carving techniques how to keep your hands safe and band-aid free and how to be able to carve for a long period of time without wearing your hands out there are some very specific hacks that will make a huge difference in how you feel as you are carving we'll look at techniques for how to pull a successful print and then once it's all done and dry we will take a look at what kind of considerations you need to take into account if you're wanting to add some watercolor for example or pencil crayon or some other color medium to your piece after the fact so what is printmaking it's been around for centuries everybody from hokusai to picasso has had their time being completely entranced by it what we're going to be looking at specifically is relief printing which is usually linoleum or wood where we take an image we transfer it onto the block we use carving tools to remove portions of the block and then when we roll ink on top it hits the parts that we've left and it misses the parts we've carved out so now when we lay paper over it or fabric and we transfer it in one of a number of ways i'm going to show you we bring that paper up and suddenly we have uh if we're using black ink and white paper we have a black image on white what we carve into the block will actually be a mirror image when it comes up like butterfly wing so if we're incorporating anything like writing into our piece we need to make sure that we take our drawing or our design and we flip it before we put it onto our block so that when it comes out and we get that butterfly wing effect our writing or our image is in the direction we expect it to be so we'll go over how to handle that as well so we can print a single layer of black ink on white paper for example or any color ink and any color paper we can vary our ink on that plate so we have a number of different colors with that single printing process we can print with multiple blocks either in what's called a reduction print or multiple different card blocks or we can do what we're doing today which is make a single layer print and then add another medium in once that print is dry so let's start with our materials we will need something to draw with either a sketchbook and a pencil eraser or in my case an ipad and an apple pencil but whatever you're comfortable drawing with we'll need a piece of linoleum that will end up being the same size as our printed image if you are going the sketchbook root we'll need some trace paper and either way we'll need some good old-fashioned carbon paper now with our linoleum we have a few different options we can go with a soft cut or an easy cut one of these thicker easier to carve type of plates we can use a mounted linoleum where the linoleum is actually adhered to a wooden block or what we will use today is an unmounted linoleum and when we get to that part i'll tell you where you might use one or the other and why i tend to always go for the unmounted linoleum we'll also use some carbon paper to do our transfer we'll need a ballpoint pen that makes the best contact with the carbon paper to transfer your image onto your linoleum we're going to want some carving tools so we'll take a look at these speed ball sets they have interchangeable nibs so you can use different ones depending on what kind of line you're wanting to make i tend to use this one strictly for this fine can you see that there we go this fine little uh tip it's a really nice one for carving delicate lines i love using these japanese carving tools they are fantastic and i do almost all my carving with three specific blades and i'll show you those as we go as well we'll need a cutting mat to work on uh or you can use some non-skid from the dollar store to keep your plate steady as you're carving we'll need some ink there are a few options if we're going to be painting on this we're going to want to use a waterproof ink we'll also need some glass or plexiglass to roll our ink on what i like to do is anytime i have a glass frame that gets a ding in it or a chip i like to just mask it off with tape and use that as a rolling surface you can also use glass cutting boards like a cheese plate i use usually when i'm print making outside a little heartier or plexiglass is great you'll also need a bearing or a printing press that's a pretty tall order but i'll show you mine when we get to the printing part or you can do your transfer with something as simple as a wooden spoon and that can be completely effective we'll need some good quality print making paper because we are planning to paint on this afterwards our options are using a hot or cold pressed watercolor paper or what i love using is stonehenge stonehenge is a print making paper that takes water media beautifully we want some cardboard or a drop sheet to protect our table our workspace and then after we've had a few days of drying time we'll want some watercolor paints and brushes and as we go we are going to want some rags and paper towel i love to have wet wipes on hand just to clean up as we go keep our hands clean as we're touching paper and going back and forth so that's important to have as well so once we have all our tools ready it's time to start thinking about our design the key thing with lino cut is it is binary when you cut into that plate that piece of the plate is gone if you leave a portion of the plate that is gonna print there's no gray area there's no gray scale so you can create the appearance of grayscale with texturing with making a series of lines or marks but the linoleum is either there to accept the ink or it's not so as soon as we start thinking in black and white or colored ink and paper we're going to be in the right place part of the beauty of this medium is that stark contrast thinking in two simple tones i find that my pieces are most successful when i have some big areas of solid ink some big areas that are completely cleaned out and then a range of areas where the texture is varied and it creates interest of course general composition rules apply as well we don't want to just take our object and plunk it in the middle of our plate we want a plan to lead the eye through the composition giving it lots of detail to feast on lettering can be a really fun element to including your design keep in mind though when we take our image we need to flip it before we carve so any writing or recognizable directional things you have going on you need to flip them before you carve so that they come out the right way around so i went ahead and did this sketch on my ipad in a program called procreate which is fun because it gives me this time lapse and what i'm focusing on is having some good areas of dark some clear areas of light and then a mix of textures in between so at this point we've got our design our drawing or we've got an image on our ipad and if you're using the ipad i'll get you to flip the drawing and print it out and then we can move on to the transfer so in this portion we are taking our design and we're transferring it onto our linoleum this is why our design needed to be a size that fits on our linoleum block so we'll line it up we'll tape along one edge and then we will slide our carbon paper in between the drawing and the linoleum with the dark side down sounds obvious but it can get missed now if you are using the trace and flip method this is a really good time to double check and make sure that you have indeed flipped your drawing the way i like to ensure that i've done this is i will write an f on the side that i've done the drawing on and then when i go to carve that that should be backwards if you've used a digital drawing you just need to make sure that you flipped that drawing in your computer before you printed it now we get our carbon paper in between our drawing and our linoleum we use a ballpoint pen and we transfer those lines this part's nice and easy and if you're using the tan unmounted linoleum it takes carbon beautifully [Music] if you're using the soft cut or one of those more rubbery types of plates you can do your drawing in pencil flip it over and simply rub the back and it should transfer fairly clearly for me i love having more detail and that's why i like the carbon paper and unmounted linoleum root the other reason i prefer the unmounted linoleum is at times i will want to take my designs and print them out on a printing press for me specifically i love to print table linens with my designs so if i'm using a thicker plate i'm going to have issues having the roller of the printing press roll smoothly over the edge of the plate so for that reason i stick pretty much always with unmounted linoleum one of the things i love about this doing the drawing flipping the drawing over drawing it again to transfer the carbon onto your block is it gives you a chance to revise your image each time you draw it and really get to know the image by the time you pick up a carving tool there's no going back there's no control z or control z for our american friends when you're carving into linoleum if you cut something away it is gone for good it might not mean that the piece is dead it might just involve what we call a design change but you can't put something back once it's cut so it's good to review it a few times make all the adjustments that you want to make be super clear in your mind what's going to get cut and what is going to remain before you start cutting now on to carving this is my favorite part the first time i ever did a lino cut i had shown up at a life drawing session the model didn't show up and the people who were running the session had access to a bunch of lino cut tools they had just done a workshop so they pulled those out instead and from the moment i held that knife in my hand and cut it into the linoleum i was just completely hooked i love the feel of the carve so this is where i see a lot of students get apprehensive when they first arrive in a workshop either they are afraid that they're going to cut themselves or they've tried it before and what they found is that their hands get worn out way too fast or it's just plain hard to cut into so there's a few tricks that will make a huge difference on that front the first is cutting cold linoleum is hard so you want to warm it up a lot of people will use either a heat gun or a blow dryer i've seen people put them in the microwave i'm not sure what that does to the plate or hold them up to space heaters but what i do that i find is super effective is i sit on it i just tuck a piece of linoleum under my seat and as soon as i can't feel that it's colder than my body i know it's ready to carve so first of all you want to make sure that you are safe so the blade is always pointing away from you and your non-dominant hand is behind the blade so if you suddenly lurch forward you're not going to embed that blade into the web between your thumb and your fingers that would not be fun so the technique that i use it keeps my hands safe and it also allows me to carve for a much longer period of time because of the way i'm holding the blade so i take the blade in my dominant hand i place the tip into the linoleum my hand is used strictly for steering so i'm going to swing it left or right all the steering comes from my elbow and my arm not by moving my wrist so this is locked and you're just holding the tool and all the steering is coming from here okay my non-dominant hand is going to be the pressure so this is what presses the knife into the linoleum and this is where our steering comes from what that does is it gives your lines just a beautiful fluid kind of flow and also your dominant hand won't get worn out all of the muscle is coming from here and this is strictly steering so there are a couple of different techniques when you're carving the first is we're going to just make a straight line so we have our tool we put the pressure on with our non-dominant hand the linoleum is warm enough and that tool is going to slide forward we can either come up like a dolphin surfacing and let that blade come out of the linoleum and you'll get a nice curved end or we can drive that cut forward and lift our tool and the linoleum will snap off giving us a flat line so if you're thinking about how you want your line to look that'll tell you whether you want to surface like a dolphin or lift the tulle and have the piece snap off there are some other fun things you can do one technique i love using is taking a small c groove and twirling it around holding it perpendicular to the linoleum so it pops out a perfect little dot another thing we can do is we can texture with some cross hatching so that would involve taking a very fine tool either a v groove or the smallest blade in one of these speed ball cutters and we make just a series of lines very close to one another when it prints of course the cuts will be paper and the and the parts you leave will be ink if we want to cross hatch when we're drawing with a pencil or pen or paint brush and we cross hatch those lines layer over top of one another when we do it in print making we're cutting away with each cut so instead of dark lines making a little grid we will have light lines leaving little ink colored islands between each spot where they cross over so important to know that more cross hatching makes it lighter not darker and now we just start to work our way through the piece thinking about what kinds of cuts we're making if we're clearing out a large area we may want to use a fine tool to outline that area and then we can use a bigger c groove to remove the chunks faster in between those lines once you have the tools in your hand and the linoleum in front of you you'll just start to play and find all kinds of different techniques for making different kinds of marks so let's just do a fast zip through as i carve this plate so you can see it start to finish i know this is moving too fast to really see what i'm doing but what i want you to notice here is that i am consistently keeping that non-dominant hand as my pressure dominant hand is steering the non-dominant one is the power so it is safely behind my blade and it's also creating a situation where my dominant hand isn't going to get burned out before my art brain does carving this way i can usually go for several hours this piece we're looking at i carved in an afternoon now we are ready to print so the first thing i want to do is flip over my plate give it a good few wax to make sure that i get any loose linoleum bits out of it so you'll want to have either a popsicle stick or a palette knife to get your ink out onto the glass plate we will spread that out nice and smooth and sheer i've got a pretty good amount of it here just to make sure we can get through this whole print now we're going to take our roller or our brayer and we're going to place it on the glass now it's tempting to take that roller and plunk it into the middle of the ink but it's going to be super gloppy so what you want to do is put the roller on the plate and roll up until it just has a nice big smoosh with that line of ink and then draw it back lift our roller up so that the wheel can keep turning and then put it back down on that bit of ink in a different spot and draw back just keep on running it through until we have a completely smooth velvety bed of ink we can go from the other side as long as we're printing with just one color and run it through makes that nice sound and once it's completely smooth like a matte velvet it's ready to roll okay so now we're going to take our plate and we're going to line it up and we are going to start to roll our ink out now once the roller has done a single revolution it stops having enough ink to deposit so one thing i see beginners do is they'll often keep on rolling on the plate without going back to our inking plate and getting more ink so thin thin veils and lots of them is the key to getting a nicely inked plate here we go and so we just keep adding to it like that until our plate looks like it is evenly inked i like to get down and just look at it at an angle and see if there are some areas that i've missed and then i'll go back in once we're sure that we've got our plate evenly inked we're going to put the plate aside get these messy things out of the way double check our hands make sure there's no ink on them give them a quick wash and then we'll get our paper and get ready to make our first print if i was making multiple layers i would be using a jig so that i get perfect alignment every time because we're just printing one color of ink i can be a little more relaxed with this one so what i'll do is take a piece of paper that is the size i'm printing on put it underneath my plate so i can position it exactly where i think it should go on that paper and then i'm going to take my print making paper the one that we're making the print on i'm going to hold one end up as i line the other end corners up with my base paper and when i feel like i've got good alignment i'm going to confidently in one motion lay that piece of paper down now once it's down we can't second guess if you move it you'll get little ghosty lines you don't want those so down and done now we'll take our baron or our wooden spoon they both work i think really equally well and we'll just start to rub i like to do this in a circular motion and keep on working in patches and rows back and forth throughout the whole print one important thing to note when you're using your baron all of your power is coming from your shoulder so you're not pressing down you are driving down and the power that you get from your shoulder pushing down through your arm onto the plate is going to make it much easier to get a good print things to watch for when you're printing you want to make sure you get the corners it's easy to miss an edge your corner any place where there's lots of detail or your focal point you'll really want to pay attention and make sure you give that a really good rub any big dark areas you want to make sure you go over that with with lots of force really i'm saying every single part when you think about it you just want to keep going over it until you are confident that you've really made that transfer now for me i have the luxury of having a press in my house my husband has the luxury of moving it every time we move which he doesn't love but uh but i love this thing and if you're doing a ton of print making and it's a possibility for you you would never regret it or gathering up with a few other print maker friends and and investing in one or finding a local print co-op and becoming a member so you can have access to all this kind of equipment and not have to buy it or house it but for today we will make this print by hand this is the moment of truth this is the best moment in printmaking is the moment we peel up our first print and there it is i love this moment now because we are wanting to add a watercolor layer i'm going to put this print aside i'm going to let it dry for several days if i had used a water-based ink i could add some color i could add color with pencil crayon if i wanted to do a lot of layering in of color like i do with a lot of my work i really need to have used a waterproof ink one of my favorite inks is soy based it's called akua akua and after several days of drying it is a hundred percent waterproof you can also use an oil-based ink uh another one of my favorites uh gamblin oil-based inks are amazing or you can use a speedball fabric inks are waterproof and and they'll hold up to a watercolor wash so there's your basic process for making a single plate one color relief print on paper we'll come back in a few days and add our color washes and now while we're at it we may as well because we have them here take this image and print it onto a placemat we are using an oil-based ink so should be fine i usually use speedball fabric ink for this but i think this is probably gonna be good [Music] fingers crossed this part's definitely a workout and how did he go oh yeah that is lovely all right so it's been a few days since i pulled my print and let's just see give it a little press there and my finger comes up clean so that means it is dry enough to add a little watercolor now when i am watercoloring on to these prints like i said you need to make sure you've got a suitable paper so either watercolor paper or something nice and sturdy like a stonehenge i have my paint my piece laid on top of a piece of gator board just protects my table it's absorptive i've got some watercolor paints here got some water and i have one brush i generally do all of this with something along these lines this is a number 12 zen from royal and langnickel i bought these super cheap and i bought a stack of them for teaching and they've become my favorite brush so the reason i like these is they can hold a fair bit but most of what i'm going to be doing i'm going to be wanting wanting to use a fairly fine point because i'm not doing big watercolor washes i'm adding real spot color to this what you can't see in this frame is my reference photo so i will show you that and now let's get to it oh the other thing i always have handy is a rag so i can take a little excess moisture off my brush whenever i need to i leave my palette all messy like this because if i need to i can clear a spot and make sure that i have very pure color but i like colors to play with each other i think you get some really nice effects this bottom plate here is what i'm going to start with and it is a lovely kind of bamboo tone so i'm just going to with a fairly dry brush and a very light stroke add some of that bamboo color in there i've done my created shadows with my hatching so i'm not going to do a lot of painting painting adding different layers and shadows i'm just going to give some topical color because it's a little more true to how a print would [Music] one thing i will do because i'm doing this for you normally i would flip the paper around over and over so that i'm never painting uh with the pointy end um but that my pointy end is always kind of against the edge that i'm doing but i'll just switch hands here so you don't have to see the paper flip over and over [Music] because i'm using an oil-based ink it does kind of repel the watercolor a little bit it'll stay kind of pretty much in the in the zone but if i'm careless it will spill over for sure [Music] i don't know if everybody makes sound effects when they paint but i do okay like that gives us enough of that and i'll rinse my brush clean it off a bit now the actual plate here is yellow so i'm going to save that to later because i've got lots of things that are this kind of woody tone this whole scene is very sort of woody that's a bit too red i won't do a big color theory thing here but opposite of red is green so i'll knock it back a bit of green more of that brown wood tone for my salad bowl and oh let's need a little more red red so i want this to be noticeably richer in tone than my other color but i don't want to leave puddles it's a big thing with working this way is you want your paint application to be fairly smooth and flat do okay what else is that woody tone uh our handles on our salad servers are now i'm really just aiming for the white lines that i've made with the tip of my brush i'm trying not to leave paint just sitting on top of ink so you know i could do this with a teeny tiny brush but if you just really use the tip of the brush you can do it with a round and then if you find you have moments where you have a little too much wetness on the paper just dry up the brush and soak up the paint that is there we want the wicker of our basket so that's similar in tone just maybe a little more water a little less pigment needs to be a little weightier a little white in there making little naples ish [Music] oh yeah that's doing it so there's some texture to this wicker so i don't want to just paint that in like a paint by number i'm gonna just give it some liveliness by having the paint not quite echo open i like that and i'm going to add a little green to my goldy green salad bowl little green gold i want it to have that sort of aged metallic look [Music] oh that's fun i'm keeping my touch super light on here not over burdening the paper with water or paint any excess so we've got lots of worms in here clean up a little spot on there let that thirsty brush pick up all the excess on my palette and now i want a real yellow for my melamine yellow plate there [Music] because when i add the color for the silverware it takes on quite a purpley blue tone and i want this yellow to contrast with my purple that's going to be the highest point of contrast in this piece color wise so because i'm working in such light glazes i don't have to wait a super long time for that to dry before i can go in with my other color but i do want to give it a little moment so i've got some nice purples going here i'll pick those up and i'll just give the inside of my spoon over here into my basket not much to add there [Music] we go i want to preserve the reflections in my spoon so there nothing is super white here so i can get all the little tinting i'm looking at this i'm thinking these two things are fighting a bit so i'm going to darken this napkin a little bit one of the things i love about working this way let's say i do a run of 15 of this limited edition print series i can approach each one completely differently completely different color way or i can just alter the intensity in the hue a little bit i get to sort of play look at it a few different ways take a few different approaches and just really enjoy that freedom and that is essentially how i create a lino cut print with watercolor wash thank you so much for joining me on this tutorial i had fun i hope you did too you

Channel: Carol McQuaid

Views: 30,317

Rating: 4.9092627 out of 5

Keywords: Art demo, artist, printmaking, printmaker, how-to, linocut, relief print, art demonstration, make a linocut, fine art, art class, linocut class, art workshop, linocut workshop, printmaking workshop, printmaking process, make prints, art demo lesson, linocut demo, art demo class, carol mcquaid, watercolour, watercolor, printmaking with watercolour, linocut watercolour, linocut with watercolour, printmaking tools, printmaking materials, linocut materials, linocut tools

Id: xbmooFaQWwU

Length: 39min 48sec (2388 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020