Hi. Today I want to talk to you again
about dividing a design drawing up into separate blocks to make a print, but I
decided that this time I would show you from a finished print, back to how to
separate it, because I know it's a really difficult concept to grasp and I thought
I would give as many sorts of ways of looking at it as possible. So I actually
cut one of my Scottish designs into finished blocks and I'm just going to
put the final layer onto one of my prints and then we'll work backwards as
to how I divided it up into the different areas. So I'm just going to do
that final layer and I'm going to do that as a rainbow roll, now we're going
to look at all the technicalities of inking up and rollers and pressure and
things like that in this series, but for now all I want is to get a finished
print so that I can show you. So today I'm not working with oil-based inks, I'm
working with water-based inks and when I say water-based I mean they clean
with water not Safe Wash inks, these are actually water-based inks, so the ones
I've got in front of me here are made by a company called Graphic Chemical and
they do make nice water-based inks, sometimes the supply isn't great they
can be quite hard to get hold of, so you can't always get all the colours. But I have them in my workshop so I'm
going to use those today, the other inks that I'm using in this process are the
ones I use to teach with, which are Lukas inks, again, water-based inks which
I mix up into different colours to teach classes, so those are the inks that I'm
using today and we will look at inks properly in another episode, but I've got
a live stream coming up and I want to print with some water-based inks so that
we can talk about them on the live stream. So now I'm just going to ink
my block up. and I just want to make sure that
there's no rogue ink around the place so I'm just going to take the time to check
and wipe any areas that I think might have ink on them where I don't want it to
be, you can see from how grubby this block is that I've been using it all
morning. So I've got my registration device here for
tabletop printing and it has the adaption on it to take a smaller sized piece of paper
and the paper I'm working with at the moment is Hosho, it's a Japanese paper,
and again I'm just testing that out because I've been questioned about it on
the live stream so I'm working on that at the moment. So you can see I'm just checking on my
prints progress as I'm taking the impression. And I should say, while I think
of it, that these registration devices that we sell we now sell them with and
without a bench hook so that you can use them in a printing press if you want to,
obviously the bench hook is for hand printing because it holds the device in
place. So I think I'm now in business to talk to you about how I
split this print up into its different blocks. So now I've taken what is
actually a very rough and ready proof I can start to explain to you how I
divided this drawing up into three different blocks, so here I've got my
pencil drawing and I wanted quite a graphic sort of interpretation of it and
what I like about this gulley is kind of the movement in it so I knew that I
wanted quite a sort of dynamic kind of print, so if I just show you the
different blocks I've got here, I've got three blocks, I've left the ink on them
so that you can see. Here they are
and there they go from light to dark very straightforward compared to my
usual way of printing, they give quite nice results, you
can also see from the inking up that I've used a roll with different colours
on just because it looks better that way in the finished print, but you can
see also that the palest block has the most lino left on it and then the next
block has less lino and then the final block has the least lino of all. So
what I started out with to arrive at that were three blocks of lino that I
had marked up with my master tracing and mapping out with the master tracing is
is something that I'll show you in this series, so I've got what looks like
quite a sterile tracing here, but I had three of these, one for each block, and
then I simply went in and I marked out my areas. I'm going to use chinagraph or
rather three different coloured chinagraphs to try and explain to you how I
decided which areas to cut when it came to planning out this three block linocut.
So here is the palest block which has the most lino on it and what I started
out with were three blocks that looked identical to this one, so the whole size
of the print with the master tracing in carbon on it and my thinking for the
palest one was that I was going to get as much leave as much lino behind as
possible because if I have a pale block that goes over as much as possible the
darker blocks that come on top will hide the pale lino and putting a block on top
of the under block means that I don't have to worry about
lining things up exactly, so it cuts down registration problems if that pale block
just goes under everything on the print, so the bit that I kept very much
up here was important because I needed my sky, but I also have that pale block
running down over here. Now because I started out with my lino being the
whole area of the print I could be very lively about how I cut out this block
and you can see those edges are very different from the traced edges, the hard
traced edges, I've been very choppy, I've stuck roughly to this shape, you can see
particularly up here, you can see here, because of course we're looking at the
lino backwards, you can see I've stuck to that sort of arching shape, but
I've been very loose about how I followed the edge of that, and that's
absolutely fine, it doesn't matter, because this is white space anyway so
there's nothing lining up with that, so that's my palest block that I'm
showing with this white chinagraph so I got that one cut and then I went on to the
next block which is my mid-tone, which I'm showing here with this rather pretty
rainbow roll on it, and we will look at different inking techniques in these
videos, so this next block you can see the big difference is that there's no
sky here so I had to be careful about getting this edge quite right,
because I wanted the edge of my mountain nice and crisp and also I had to leave behind enough dark here to separate the pale sky from the pale
face of the mountains. I don't know if you can hear that but that's my other
cat Betty who's decided to come and shout at me. So my second block
is coming down here and here, a little bit less lino left behind, but
it's still doing all of the stones up here as well and the stones here coming
down, less of the area here and some of the stones in the foreground, but
still catching those stones, and down here, so this one has a lot more cut into
it and you can see the edges are getting even more choppy again, so there's quite
a lot of lino cut away so I'm cutting away all of this stuff, but I'm safe in
the knowledge that I don't have to line this up exactly with the under block
it's going to sit on top of it and I'm also, at this stage, taking out, cutting
out, little stones at random, you can see it better here, so that that under layer
will show through and here I've cut texture into those blocks as well.
So that's that layer, just get this a little wipe, and then we're going to come
on to the final layer which has the least lino left behind of all, and
with this layer, now I do have a registration issue to think about
because I need this line here to be right because it's got to line up with the sky block here and also with my
secondary block hear, so we've got to marry all those
edges, so all of those edges need to be nice and crisp for everything to line up
well. So a little bit of registration to do in the sky, but when it came to
cutting I was just focusing on where the stones are this time in the centres and
the edges and you can see now I'm losing quite large spaces and really just
sticking to the center of things and round the edges, so the job of this line
block is really to put shadow in and depth and it's all these little cutout
areas around here, so it's adding movement and it's really
bringing the whole print together. If I show you the difference between the
first two blocks printed, you can see here, so this is the first two blocks,
it's fine, there's nothing wrong with it, but it lacks any depth or a kind
of narrative, it's lacking, so when that final block goes in it really serves to
bring the whole print together and as I was always working from three whole
pieces of lino, I was able to just cut with reference to edges, but not having
to line up exactly with edges and it also means, working this way, with them
layering, rather than each little bit matching up, it means that I can carry on
taking prints and adjusting the cutting as I go. So I have an example here of my
second block so you can see with this one, this is a early example of my second
block, and you can see the cutting here is quite bold
and I changed my mind and I've actually gone back in and I finessed it I
have taken bits out here and I've done more cutting away here as
well and there's a few cuts in the mountains as well. So you see you can,
using this method, sort of edit as you go on printing and we'll look at that
with a different design as the series progresses, but I hope that that's been
another way of looking at how a print is divided into blocks and that it's been
helpful and I hope you'll join me for another film.
