Printing 'Falls Near Galloway': A Multi Block Linocut Using Economy Inks and Tools

hello I'm Laura Boswell I'm a printmaker and today I'm going to show you how to make a linocut using my registration device and some economy products in my style of printmaking so today we're going to be working with water-based inks the inks i've got here these are Lucas inks and I have pre-mixed sand colors and I put them in these cosmetic bottles because I find that keeps them nice and clean and fresh for my students while I'm teaching a class the other thing that I'm going to use is extender that's a big part of my work it's ink was no color in it and it makes when it's mixed with the colored inks it makes them more transparent so it's a nice product to use if like me you like sheets a very thin transparent color in your inks so that's made by graphic chemical don't be alarmed by the color of it here that won't show in the print we're going to use two types of rollers today one is this one by SD it's got a blue handle and it's a slightly soft roller it's the best value roller that I found they make two one with a red handle which is a hard one which I would avoid for linocut printmaking and this one that works well the other roller is this little red wire handled one I use this one all the time in my work and it's really great for dropping in details spot color things like that and we'll do a better fit of that while I print today and take the impression I've got two things here for robbing the back of the paper this is called a baron and it's based on a Japanese woodblock printing tool but this one is plastic again it's an economy product but it's brilliant for lino because it's really sturdy and it will give you a good general pressure the other thing is a trusty spoon and this can be used to apply spot pressure in areas where you want to just reinforce the rubbing to get more ink to the paper so those are the tools we're going to be using the paper that we're working with this is called simle paper and that spell let's see if I can get this right s IM IL i it's a japanese paper it's a soft paper and again it's a very good value paper and it takes ink well i am going to use lots of layers of ink today in this demonstration but i'm going to keep them very thin how many layers you can use on this paper is very dependent on how you ink up your line though so just be aware of that when you're working with the paper i'm going to open up the registration device now and you can see how filthy my one is that's because i was using it in the summer at shows and i was printing on rickety tables in fields in front of people and frankly printing on a kitchen table is a lot easier than that so you'll see it's quite adaptable it's got a bench hook that's holding it steady while i'm working and i'm going to put my line oh the first place of liner into the frame now I normally work by using a reduction method and that means that my whole picture comes out of one piece of lino and I cut away between layers of color for this video I'm going to use a multi block lino print and if you want to make multi-block lino or reduction lino you'll find films about those on this channel as well so I'm using traditional artists lino here and I've stuck it to a piece of MDF using carpet tile adhesive you could use double-sided tape and it's holding it firm in the registration device I've stuck it to MDF because we have a lot of her here but it could just as well be used in this device with strong cardboard or card as the backing so the lino itself before I even started cutting it I prepared it by giving it a little Sandover with a lightweight sandpaper very fine grade just have key the surface slightly so that's the device and before I get printing I'm going to mark up my paper so that I can take it off the device to show you each layer of color and put it accurately back down so what I need for that is just a ruler and a pencil and the registration device comes with these guidelines around it and I'm simply transferring the guidelines onto the back of my printing paper so that I can reposition now it pays to do this carefully because the more careful you are about putting these lines down on the paper the easier it is to get everything perfectly lined up and registered so your print stays crisp so now we've got everything sorted out I'm going to open up the device and ink up and we'll keep the paper out of the way over here now I'm going to ink up in the device because I'm filming but if you're doing this then I would suggest that you keep the two separate you take the block out to ink it up and then pop it into the device to print it because that avoids all this mess around here that I've made so I'm mixing here's my extender and I'm gonna mix my base color so let's have a little bit of this gray blue now the thing about extender is that it makes the paint more the inks more transparent if I mix this to make it paler if I mixed it with white it would immediately alter the quality of the color and make it more chalky so think of the extender like watercolor added to adding water to watercolor I should say it just makes those darker colors more transparent so when we cut my paper I always save the offcuts because you do need to test colors so I'm just going to have a little look at that yeah that's looking pretty good to me and I'm going to start rolling this out these little plastic nice or a really good idea again they're very cheap and cheerful I think they cost about 60 P or something and I have loads of them really handy so what I'm aiming for is to work that expend it over the perspex now when you use extender for the first time you'll find that it needs working more than ink with colour in it can you hear that thumping that's me rolling and lifting so that the roll turns don't just move back and forth because that won't help to spread it out as well make sure that you lift the roller so what I'm looking for here is almost like suede now with extender it can be a bit tricky because of course the ink is transparent so you can't see as well so you will need to practice a bit if you're using extender for the first time so I'm now going to start working that over the block and you see with this it's question of back and forth to build up the ink rather than putting a great big layer on all together at once because I don't want a thick layer my liner cuts are very influenced by my time in Japan learning about Japanese woodblock which is a multi-layered very thin transparent layered process so liner cuts for me now are becoming increasingly many layers of transparent color rather than maybe six layers of thicker colour the other thing about extender is it needs working on the block more than ordinary ink to get a smooth layer so I'm just going to work the roller back and forth and this does take practice so don't be dismayed if at first you start having problems with coverage or roller marks you will gradually get a feel for how much you need so I'm just going to cover this and I'm looking for a very very thin layer and I'm not particularly concerned that it's perfectly smooth the picture that I'm demonstrating for you today is of some falls near Galloway up in Scotland and it's quite a rough already landscape so it's kind of nice if being King isn't glassy smooth and if you look at my work on my website you'll see that I quite often have textural quality and scanty inking and I feel that that kind of suits my method of working so I'm going to bring the paper down and take an impression first of all I'm going to work with the Baron and see how I'm holding it fingers under the handle hand flap down if you hold it by the handle you won't get as even a pressure and it hurts your hand this way the weight of your hands doing the work so I'm just going to go over it in little circles like this now I'm sitting down because I'm filming but you might find it easier to do this standing up I would normally do this standing so I'm just going to work over the whole piece initially and one of the nice things about this registration device is it does allow you to have a sneaky peek and I can see that I need a bit more pressure around the edges so this is where the spoon comes in and I'm just going to work around the edges of the print just a catch down and get the crisp edge now the thing is about using thin layers and scanty inking is that it's fine for it to be scanty and rough but it's worth taking the time to get crisp edges because if you don't have something that's crisp it suggests that you're not just not inking very well so balance the scantiness with crisp registration and crisp edges to make the print look intentional okay that's coming along nicely now so now I've taken the first impression I'm going to take the print off to show you and you can see that I've got a very very thin layer here and it's quite textural and that works absolutely fine for this first layer because there are a lot of other layers to come on top so I need to put the print back into place on the registration device and that's where these pencil guidelines come in so I'm taking my time just to make sure that everything is properly registered and lined up so that the paper is in the right place and the print stays nice and crisp so let's get that paper out of the way so here's my second block which is the landscape at the top of the waterfall and I'm going to go back to my ink and just scoop up the ink and make it a little bit darker now when I was a student I was skin so I used to do everything I could to save inks and that usually involved recycling everything I had and actually that's how I always work and I find mixing color into color is a really good way of keeping my palette natural so I've got a slightly darker color not much just a tad and I'm going to do a little bit of flatting King now and by flat inking I mean I'm just going to ink the whole block with the wider roller so I'm just taking my time again to work the extender over the whole thing and it's ready to take a flat layer of color now I am going to print this entire print without a break you will do better to let it dry between impressions and I would be doing that too if we were in the studio but for this film I'm just going to print wet on wet so that you can see how the picture develops so I'll take my impression and again I'm going to check whether it needs any work so a little bit of pressure around the edges and with this I'm going to print another layer of ink on the same block so I'll open this out and it's just made things a little bit darker there so for this next bit I'm going to use one of the little rollers and put in some detail now now this idea that you can ink in between cutting or on the same plate it's very much a Japanese woodblock thing and something I do a lot with liner these days so let's come over here and just let's have a little bit more dark ink going on and maybe we'll have a little bit of green so I'm just putting a little bit of yellow ink in there just to start tipping things over greeny greeny gray okay there we go so let's pop back over here and we'll use these little rollers [Music] okay so this time I'm just gonna drop in and you see how I'm just not putting any pressure on that roller I'm just more or less letting the roller put the ink down itself because I want it to be a lot lighter slightly random if I see any hard edges that the roll is left that I don't like then you can always get a little a cloth and just soften up those edges a little bit so let's just do that okay and then Lee device comes back down again now if you're using this registration device doing these multiple printing is actually really easy in the studio I have a great big printing press and it's very physical taking things in and out lots of times so I always think that keeps me fit so I'm just gonna work over that again okay I'm just gonna have a sneak peek that's nice now I'm starting to get more layers coming and before I show you in close-up I'm just going to put another bit of color on that we're gonna go to that greenie color and let me just check that's okay yeah that's nice so I'm gonna use the roller it's a bit of a tilt here just to run a little bit down the edge of the block so really just dropping it in where I want it and this time I'm just going to muddle it up a little bit more with wiping because I want to just soften that well maybe we'll have a little bit in the tree as well and that's just so you see how those little wire handled rollers are really handy for putting in those little bits of detail okay let's let's just I could do this all day so I'm gonna stop there and let's just take the impression so back down it goes and just going to rub that see so by using the baron here I'm not putting particular spot pressure on so it's still giving that kind of textural approach if I go in with the spoon it's going to be a much denser application of ink to the paper so you can control how dense the ink is on the paper by using the spoon to add a little bit more pressure where you want it so let's just see maybe on the tree we'll just go in there with a spoon okay so now I've done that let me put that down so that you can see better what I've done and it's subtle stuff but it's worth taking the trouble as you can see the sort of bluey gray bit here is quite soft and random the darker green down the edges but it's all still staying crisp see how those trees are perfectly in place and combining soft loose textures with crisp registration is a really valuable tool for producing a great-looking linocut so now we've printed the first two layers I'm going to mix up some color to put the next layer on which is the grass and I've cleaned off my perspex just by wiping it with a damp cloth with these water-based inks they clean off really easily you can see that the Lucas inks are mixing with the graphic chemical extender the rule of thumb for me with with what is compatible is to look at the way that inks clean off so if they require a soap and detergent to clean them rather than just a damp cloth they probably aren't compatible to mix with the pure water-based ink so just look at the way that they clean and make sure that all the inks you're using clean off in the same way so I've added a bit of yellow to my gray green to make quite a bright color here and again I'm just going to check that out on my test a piece of paper see what we've got yeah that's quite nice so I'm going to put a flat layer of this all again and that's a big roller again I want a very thin layer because I might well go back and put a little bit of shading in as well so let's go with that now when I'm cutting line out to print I like my lino to print without any ridges in the cleared out space these ridges it when you're clearing out that pick up ink and print I tend to call a little chatter and I don't use them in my printing some print makers really like that ridgy look with little random bits of color but I don't so I make sure that when I'm cleaning out the liner is cut very flat and sometimes I'll use a carpenter's chisel when I've cut I cut ridges into I cut away the lino and then to take all the ridges out I'll go in there with the chisel and just cut flat you can see this is very flat so I'm just working that yellow over the block with my roller just making sure again this has got extender in it because I've been mixing color into color into color so the original extender that I mixed in is still there so we're still dealing with that so we still need to work the ink quite a lot over the block okay now I've got some ink in the dead space's and that's almost inevitable so I'm just going to go in there and wipe and just remembering to keep things clean makes a big difference people often ask me about how do you keep everything clean when you're printing and there's no trick to it it's just being diligent about where you're wiping and cleaning and while I've been talking to your just noticed a bald patch so I'm just gonna drop in a bit more ink there we go so this comes back down again and I'm just going to take the impression take your time when you're doing this there's no point rushing and you get a much better result at the end if you just work over the paper carefully so now that I've taken my impression and put a layer of color onto the block again quite a textural one I'm going to go back and do that double inking thing and put in a bit of shading so back to mixing the color and let's just make it a bit darker so let's just pop that green over there and we'll have a bit more is this gray colour when I'm mixing colour like this it's a good idea to make sure that you have a little bit more contrast than you think you need because remember that you are going to be putting a very thin layer on so if everything is terribly subtle it can all kind of vanish so I tend to make things a little bit punchier then I would if I were a painter for example so I'm going to use one of the little rollers again and you'll notice that I'm not cleaning off the block that's mainly because I'm filming and I don't want to take the time to do that and you don't have to but be careful if you Inc on here that gets too dry it can get tacky and if it gets tacky it can rip the paper so just be aware of that at home you do need to know what you're doing if you're going to keep your block still inked when you're adding when you're double inking so now I'm just going to start dropping in a bit of shadow and maybe we'll go even darker so a little bit darker and here practice is everything because you it takes a little while to get a feel for how to do this but part of the trick is not to put too much pressure on the roller just let the roller drop the ink onto the block so let's just have some down here and think about this is a rough Scottish hillside that I'm printing here so I want there to be nice texture in it let's see what we've got [Music] [Music] and I'm going to check before I see if it needs any work with the spoon that's nice yeah we're getting some nice texture now good so if I take this off to show you you can see here the two colors on the block and how they're giving the texture here and it's a building up process so there are more layers to come obviously but we're starting to see this nice kind of roughness in the inking if you have a quick look at the block here you can see for a start I've put an arrow in it on it pointing at the hinge that's kind of good because I have been known to put those blocks in upside down and that can be very frustrating so see how this is clean nice and flat and just watch your edges when you're cutting especially if your hand burnishing the back of the paper because it is possible to push the paper down a little and pick up ink if there's inks close up to the cutaway area so now that's finished so here's my next block and this one has quite a lot of detail because it's going to put some form into the rocks by the waterfall and I'm just going to fit that into place and go with a darker color so let's use this bluey grate at the top I'm just going to use a little bit of that in there so again I'm not cleaning particularly I'm just pulling together what I've got on my pallet there to get miss my new color what I will do is push this yellow to the side with the palette knife and start rolling out that was yellow on that roller I didn't clean the roller off now it's up to you how tidy you are but sometimes I don't clean the roller off between layering on the ink so again I'm just going to pop that and work the ink out evenly just take your time just make sure that you've caught everything sometimes if you struggle with blank areas just look at it side on and you can see where the lights hitting it and where the light isn't shining you need to work the roller over that section a little bit more to make sure you've got good coverage okay so down that comes [Music] now this time I'm going to use the spoon a bit more because I want better coverage with the green areas I was keen for there to be lots of texture and I still want texture on this but I'd like it to be a little bit thicker a little bit more matte rather than lots of texture so I'm just going to work over it with the spoon as well just to put a little bit more pressure down I've got lots of line detail on this block and I want that line detail to show having gone to the trouble of cutting it all it would be nice to make the most of it so I'm just going to work over and make sure that we've got all that down so now I've got my detail onto the block I'm going to go back in and put a little bit darker down the center and I'm going to just mix myself a darker color gonna use that bit of green I mean mixing inks like this it's a bit like just mixing colors for painting on the palette I tend to do this as I go when I work I don't make a color study or anything like that to start with I'm usually making the color referencing one color to the next color to the next color because I work reduction printing I'm always cutting between layers of color so I'm always responding as I go along using a multiple block print like this print is very unusual for me but obviously it's much more easy to show you what's happening if I have sets of blocks so now I've got a slightly darker color I'm just going to drop that down the middle here just to give a slightly darker area nothing too dramatic just a slightly darker section so again letting the roller deposit the ink can go back down and I'll take another impression I'm going to start off with the Baron to sort of fix the paper and then go in with the spoon once the papers in the right place and safe that's better huh that's put a bit more drama into the middle of it and you can see how the darker area is working and also look at how that overlay of shadow on the green is still allowing that green to poke through that's quite important and another aspect of the way that I make prints is that I like the layers underneath to have impact on the upper layers so this next block is the one before last and it's a less exciting block in that it's just going to drop some shadows into place and it's going to be quite subtle but what it's going to do is give depth to depth to the picture and it's also going to put some more detail into the water so I'm going back to that darker color that I was using to drop in the dark areas in the center of the last layer and I'm going to ink this one up now this means that some of the darker bits the shadows won't be as obvious but that's fine sometimes when I'm cutting a block I know that even though I've cut the block not all parts of it will show and that's just one of those things sometimes so I'm just going to take my time and as always letting the roller do the work and not putting too much pressure as I'm laying down the ink now that I'm getting down towards the water part I'm going to be a bit more careful about making sure that I've got a nice layer over that and they're not going to wipe some of the ink away and that's because I've already got details showing in that water and I don't want to lose it all so I'm just going to apply my printing ink and then I'm going to use a rag just to wipe away now when you use a wiping technique it's always a good idea to think about what it is that you're trying to show so I'm going to wipe away in parallel sorts of lines like so so that it gives the feeling of water the perspective is right if I wiped away as though I was cleaning a window the water wouldn't look like water I need to wipe it in such a way that the white marks work so I'm just skimming off a little bit of that water there we go and then I can take the print and I'm putting a lot less pressure on when I'm printing now because there's very little I know on the block and the less I know the less pressure you need to put on when you're printing it's only when I get down here where the water is and they're small I know that I'm putting any weight really on there I just want to check how we're doing that's better good I'm just gonna go in with the spoon down in the bottom just make sure that I've got everything working so if you look at it now you can see the shadows just dropped in there just to make everything look a little bit more three-dimensional and it's starting to muddle the water a little bit which just helps with that feeling of reality now I'm going to put the final layer on my print and I'm just going to do what I would have done a college and pull my colors together to make that darkest layer awful with liner cuts the darkest layer is just a black and there's nothing wrong with that in the right place but it's it can be a bit harsh so as I'm talking to you you can see I'm mixing up a dark color that's made up of the inks I have been using rather than going for a totally harsh black on the top of it so I'm going to use again same roller and roll out and it's really important with very fine detail like this that you don't overload the block with ink because it can sink in and then come back out on the print it can go into the sort of dead spaces and come back out and make things messy so just take your time these water-based inks do stay open for quite a bit it's dependent on the weather obviously you'll get away with more in winter than you will do in a hot summer but they do stay open for a fair bit of time so you have got time just to be careful rolling out so again I'm messing the roller do the work and spreading all over this lock [Music] now this print is one that I've been demonstrating with this year and it's one that I sell for charity it's I send money every year to the Alzheimer's Research UK in memory of my mum and this print is for sale on my website if you want a copy and five pounds from every sale goes to Alzheimer's research ok and again I've got ink in the water here and I'm going to wipe away again so yet another layer of shading to go in that water so just gonna pull away ink and if you're not if you're new to this do you remember you can always just wipe off and if you don't like it go back ink up again and try again so practice a little bit okay down it comes and I'm being really gentle this time because it's a line block because it's fine detail the harder I press the more likely I am to blur those lines and make them clumsy so just taking my time and working over [Music] I just add a little bit of dark - laughs so I'm just gonna open that up again I'm just gonna drop in a little bit more dark down the center there so I wasn't keeping count of how many layers we've done maybe you were but you can see that the paper is still taking the layering and it's all working okay I wouldn't recommend that you do this wet on wet on wet it's not a great idea to do this unless like me you do demonstrations in fields in front of crowds it's not something I would generally advise you'll get a much better and crisper image if you let the layers dry okay so I'm just gonna drop in a little bit of dog Dallas and maybe just a longer top emphasis [Music] that's better and you can see how the registration device just holds everything in place while I'm doing this this is based on the frame I've got in my printing press and we just made a handmade version so that I could teach people on desktops okay and we now sell it through my website there's a shop on there where you can buy it so here we go you can see the final print and how that fine line detail is working so now I finished this print and hopefully that's given you a bit of an insight into how I work as well as seeing that you can get interesting results using economical tools and materials I should tell you there are loads more hints and tips on my website if you go to my resources section and there's also a list of suppliers so that's at w-w-w-whoa UK I also treat my social media like a virtual open studio so there's always loads of hints and tips and work in progress on there so don't forget to follow me on Facebook and Instagram both of which you can find me under Laura Boswell printmaker thanks a lot bye you

Channel: Laura Boswell (Laura Boswell Printmaker)

Views: 18,592

Rating: 4.9548388 out of 5

Keywords: printmaking, linocut, lino cut, relief print, multiblock print, creative printing, landscape art, landscape print, laura boswell, hand printing

Id: lnpegpcgsiM

Length: 43min 41sec (2621 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 30 2019