Hello. Today I want to talk to you about
rollers and about the tools to use for taking an impression for rubbing the
back of the paper when you're taking a print by hand without a printing press.
So to talk about rollers first I have already done a video describing rollers
in quite a lot of detail and that's in the Self Isolation series on
YouTube or if you're watching through social media it's the #lineowithlaura
series the first series, so you'll find an episode on rollers there that's quite
comprehensive, but just a little recap in case you haven't seen that. So I've
got some rollers here and they are all different sizes and costs and I just
wanted to run through them, so this blue handled roller is made by Essedd, and Essdee
make a range of rollers, they make a red-handled one and a black handled,
professional-grade I think they call that one, and I think they're the best of
the economy brands for printing rollers, printing rollers are expensive or at least
they can be expensive so Essdee make these different types of
rollers and basically the different coloured handles refer to different types.
So this red handled roller which is quite common, you see that one quite a
lot, that's a very hard roller and the blue handled one is is quite a lot
softer and there's also this blue handled one which has been sent to me by
Essdee and although it looks the same as that one it's even softer, so I'm not
sure whether, I think this might be a tester one that's just got the
same blue handle on but these the blue handle ones basically are softer, when
you are choosing a roller it's really important to have a soft roller for
doing lino, when you roll out your ink on your
glass plate or your tile or your plastic sheet whatever you're using, if you have
a rock hard roller, it's very hard to get an even layer of ink across the roller
and the temptation is that you put more ink onto the roller you have a
thicker layer of ink to get it even, because a hard roller will sort of skip
over the surface whereas a soft roller will take up a nice fine layer of ink
quite easily, so I don't go for the red-handled hard roller like that, when I
choose a roller I like a nice soft one so this blue handled one's very good as
an economy roller. The other economy roller that I use is this little wire
handled one,. Now I use these because I quite often do lino cuts where I'm
actually using different colours on one layer of printing so I'll mix up say
three or four different colours and I'll have three or four little rollers and
I'll actually blend the ink on the lino for printing and so these little
rollers are very useful for that, now these are hard rollers but they're so
small that you can still use them and get a nice layer of ink across them if
this was longer, if this was the same length as this one, I would say this was
too hard but at this size you can get away with it so I think of
these ones as being my little painting rollers, so that's another
economy roller if we go up to more expensive rollers this one is
from Hawthorn Printmaking Supplies, and I should stop here to say that when it
comes to where to buy things, if you look on my website there's a Resources
section, if you go to the Resources section there's a supplier list there
which lists UK suppliers and some foreign ones and a little bit about each
supplier, so Hawthorn make this roller and it's a nice
soft roller which I really like and quite a chunky handle there and you can
see it's quite convenient because it has a prop on it to keep the roller above
the working surface when you're resting it, and then I've got
another one here and I think I bought this one at Intaglio in London and this
is a Japanese rubber roller, again it's quite nice and soft and I quite like
these rubber rollers. Now the thing that the more expensive Hawthorn one and the
Japanese one have in common that is quite useful is that
you can take them apart to clean them. Now I wouldn't take them apart every
time I clean them after I printed with them, but periodically, if we look
at this one, I would unscrew the ends and take it
apart and scrape off the excess ink from the bar of the roller because I use a
lot of extender in my printing and I use the inks in quite a sort of dynamic way
I often end up with a lot of spray coming off the roller and onto the bar
and periodically that needs scraping back. With these rollers, the Essdee rollers,
you can't take them apart you can clean them and you can scrape those bars but
it's not quite as easy so it's a little bit more of a faff, but then they are so
much cheaper that you can see why they're sealed and you can't
take them apart. So now I've talked about rollers I want to talk about a couple of
sundry things before we move on to things to rub the back of your print
with, so let me just move those over here. Rolling out your ink, I'm very lucky
I have an enormous glass plate, in fact it's an old shower door, that I use to
roll out inks, but when I teach I'm moving from place to place and I need
something light and portable so this is an inking tray that I bought from a school
supplier and I think, I can't remember what the shop was, it was an online shop,
and it's a paint tray for children basically and these are really
useful, they're very sturdy I mean I've had these years and if you're inking up,
if the kitchen is your studio and you want to keep things tidy these little
trays are great because they have like a ridge around the edge and it
keeps all the ink in place, so little plastic trays very very good. The other
thing that I sometimes use is Perspex sheet and this was a piece of Secondary
double glazing which we didn't need anymore so Perspex sheet like that, again if you're moving about the place and you
need something that's lightweight and safe to move about then that works
very well, or you could use a tile, anything that's smooth really that you
can roll the inks. And also a shout-out for pallet knives, these plastic pallet
knives, now I think I bought them some time ago from Intaglio but I'm pretty
sure you can get them from a lot of suppliers they cost very little and this
shape, I always have been you know sort of a traditional pallet knife type person
and then I bought some of these to try and actually I like this shape very much,
so I recommend those and the metal ones I don't find these as useful actually
when it comes to manipulating and mixing inks these big fat ones are easier so I
have a lot of those and they're very useful, very cheap.
So now I want to move on to talking to you about what to use to rub
the back of your print. What I'm showing you here are called barrens,
these are Japanese printing tools and they're for printing Japanese woodblock, but they
also work very effectively for printing lino and they come in various sorts. If
we look at this one first, a traditional barren from Japan
this is bamboo, it's a bamboo leaf and it's twisted over, in this instance, a
piece of cardboard and inside the cardboard there is a plait, traditionally
a plait of bamboo, in a sort of spiral these days it could be rope, it could be
nylon, there's various things it could be and they were devised for rubbing the
back of Japanese woodblock prints to take the impression and this is one of my
everyday barrens here, I think they cost, about £50
it's been covered, fairly badly, by me, so just to show you, this is the bamboo
leaf that would cover a barren, we'll go into this a lot more when we go on to
the series about Japanese woodblock, but that's the sort of workaday
barren for rubbing the back of the print this is a rather fancier version that
I've ordered from a barren maker in Japan specifically for Japanese
woodblock printing and as you can see it's been beautifully covered by him and
this tool costs about £100 I suppose and they come in a variety of weights. now for general-purpose printing on linocut
you don't have to invest in a very expensive barren because a plastic
one will work very well so here is the sort that I used to teach
with and it's basically plastic, it's got a dimpled surface so that it moves over
the paper when you rub the back of it and when I first invested in these for
my students I was sort of a bit unsure it was going to work, I didn't like
that it was plastic but actually it's fine it works an absolute treat and then
there are very very cheap, and this one is really a very battered old one, very
very cheap versions of barrens and this one would set you back about,
all of, maybe £3 something like that, it won't last very long it's just a
piece of cardboard with a bit of bamboo wrapped around it, so this one won't last
long, but it will work very nicely. So I just want to show you the different ways
of holding them if you are rubbing the back of your print, if you hold them like
so, by the handle like that, it's quite hard to use and also it'll cramp
your hand, so the way that I always tell people to hold hold them is to put your
fingers through the handle and let your hand drop so that the weight and the
strength is coming down through the heel of your hand as you rub, compared to that,
this is a really nice stable hand hold and also if you're
standing up to print, obviously I can't because we're filming, but if you're
standing up to print then the whole weight of your arm and your shoulder is behind
it so it's much easier to put some force into your rubbing and get a nice
impression, if you're if you've got a dinky one like this just put your
fingers to the handle and drop your hand down, same rule, so you're holding it as a
flat tool to rub with. The other sort of barren that
you can use and this is great if you're printing larger lino cuts
or you're working with thicker heavier paper because this is quite a heavy
thing, this is a ball bearing barren, if I shake it maybe you can hear and this has
got ball bearings in it, now these come in various makes,
this one is, actually it's a sealed unit with the ball bearings in it and
what happens with them, the issue with the sealed ones is that you can get, as
you print, fluff goes inside them and eventually the balls get sort of stuck
because the fluff builds up around them a lot of these ball bearings bearings
you can take apart and you can actually clean out the fluff, what we've worked
out with this one after I've dropped it on it's side is you can prise it apart, but
you're not meant to, so I would never recommend that unless you're absolutely
confident you can fix it again as a means of cleaning it, so if you are going
to invest in one of these, and they can cost a lot of money, I would suggest that
you invest in one that you can take apart and clean out the fluff periodically
to keep a nice movement going, so we'll look at barrens again when we actually
are doing the printing, but for now that just gives you an idea of that tool. Spoons, back to basics, there are a lot of
people that I talk to who print with wooden spoons and use a wooden spoon to
rub the back of their prints to take the impression no problem with that at all
what I tend to do is to take most of the impression with the barren and then I go
in with a spoon and just use it to put extra pressure in small areas you can
see here this is a teaching spoon I use, that's Ikea, this is a an old
serving spoon I think, there you can see, I don't know if you can see, but I've
worn off the silver plating there with my rubbing, so I just use a spoon for
sort of intense pressure in small areas and again we'll look at that when we
come to the actual business of printing. And this last thing I was going to show
you is this a funny bit of wood, I think it's it's a bit of
bannister and again it's been smoothed off so that you can rub with it and I
show you that because if you talk to 20 people who print by hand you will have
20 different ways of rubbing the back of the print and and everybody has their
own preferred tool, Edward Bawden who was historical, he's dead now, print maker I'm a
great fan of his, he preferred tobacco tins, he rubbed the back of his
prints with a tobacco tin. So it really doesn't matter what you use to rub the
back of your paper as long as it gets the result that you need, so if it's me I
use a combination of a barren and a spoon, but if you want to use a wooden spoon or
a funny old bit of wood it honestly doesn't matter.
So that's quick trot through some tools and we will see those again when we come
to use them in future films. Thank you very much for watching and I hope you'll
join me for the next video.
