woodblock with Lino ep.7 Fine Lino Cutting; Isolating Tiny Details

[Music] hello i'm going to begin this film with an apology the soundtrack is some frost we had a very hard frost and it's now melting so you can probably hear the roof dripping in this film i'm going to show you some very fine detailed cutting so what i'm doing is i have my print here roof shingle rookery and i'm going to turn it into a special valentine's day print by getting rid of the birds and dropping in some hearts here i have my lino and i've just gone in with a white china graph and marked out where i want my little hearts to be and i want to see them really really clearly so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use indian ink and a dip pen to draw on the lino indian ink is really good for drawing on the lino and staying there permanently if you are using oil-based ink like me and cleaning with white spirit it's perfect it's it's very durable it won't transfer to the printing paper fantastic please don't use it if you are using water-based ink or if you are using safe wash print printing ink and you're cleaning with water water and indian ink will mix and the indian ink will come off and make a terrific mess so this is a process best left entirely to oil-based inks so i'm going to just get in there and draw my little hearts and the reason i like the indian ink the black indian ink is because this is tiny details that i'm working on here so having a big contrast in color with the black makes it so much easier to see and i know from experience that there's not going to be any transfer to my print hi i just wanted to let you know we are changing the frequency of our publishing and we're going to go down to one film a week it's simply that i've got a lot on at the moment and i'm writing a book for crow wood press about lino cut that i'm really excited about and we're very keen to keep providing content about printmaking and especially keen to honour those donations from the crowdfunders so thank you very much for those of you who've been doing that and it really is helping with the filmmaking and i've also got my own prints to do so i've got these lovely big prints of yorkshire which are crying out to be cut and we are going to be filming a little bit of that so that you can follow along beside me so we'll still be here every week it'll just be once a week no there's no need to use in dna you could use other things to draw on the lino with i just wanted to show you this and demonstrate how bigger contrast black ink makes so that you can see what you're doing with a fine cutting fine detail the other thing about the black ink is of course it's a contrast to the carbon so that i don't mistake the birds for hearts and cut those out as well by mistake so when it comes to cutting this out wait for the indian ink to dry thoroughly of course and i am going to use a variety of cutting tools i have some traditional ones here these are the ones um that i inherited and they're they date from the 1930s these ones these ones are power grip which are a really good sort of mid-priced tool and i like them a lot and then this is a professional japanese woodblock tool and a japanese flat chisel for clearing out so i'm going to use a whole range of different tools to do my cutting i'm also going to use um a magnifying visor there are lots of these on the market this one is optiviser it's the american uh company and um i find this very good but there are a whole range at all sorts of price points the other thing i am going to use is a slope i've found over the years that i am much more comfortable if i use a slope when i'm cutting so here's one we made or i should say ben made and it was really for photography but i use it for all sorts of things and you can see it's pretty messy um i'm going to cover it with a non-slip mat so this is again a i have put the edging around but it's just non-slip rug underlay i think we got this one at ikea but again they you can buy this all over the place and it just stops them sliding about so everything's secure the other thing i have is a bright light and for that i'm using a builder's light it's actually a light designed to light up building sites and um i'm going to put a raking light across the cutting so i can see what i'm doing i started my cutting by isolating each heart and to do that i'm using a utool and utools are very good for this because they will cut a nice even trench so so so so so now i've got all my hearts isolated i can see where they are really clearly and i know that i can get rid of the rest of the lino and not worry about hitting those hearts so i'm going to go over to a bigger tool now and just start to clean out the lino that i don't want so so now i've run those cuts through i'm going to go over to a wider tool and use that to clear out these areas this is a japanese tool for it's actually for design for wood cut but it works very well for lino you could use a flat chisel if you've got one for this this part so cutting the ridges uh cutting these these trenches through the lino with a u-shape just makes it much easier to use those wide flat tools if you try and use just the flat tool itself or a chisel to cut away the lino it it's very hard i wouldn't recommend it for cutting into the surface if you try and cut into the surface with a flat tool it's kind of clumsy but if you run these trenches through it first it's much easier i should say my lino today is pretty cold it's quite stiff stiffer than it would normally be because of the weather so so so so now that i've got all of the surface of the lino cut away i'm going to go in and i'm going to refine these areas because with a print like this where you have tiny little blocks of lino effectively on a background you want that background to be low and flat so that you don't get chatter pick up in when i when i print i don't want any ridges that's my particular choice some people really like those little random ridges in their work but i want this to print completely clean so i'm going to go back and i'm just going to make sure and this is where a flat tool really comes in useful because it's going to take out all those ridges and i can get right down that i'll still need to wipe the lino probably when i come to print but this is going to cure a lot of problems just taking the time to go over and refine and here i've got a little bit of the backing the jute backing here coming away always be on the watch for those because those little tufty bits of jute will pick up the ink and print so before i print i will also go around the edge and just make sure there aren't any stray hairs and you might have noticed how i'm using both hands here um this hand is stabilizing my non-dominant hand is stabilizing everything and guiding the tool to a certain extent and getting into the habit of doing that means that your hand is always behind the blade which is a very good idea i'm just going to switch over to something a little bit bigger so this could be a flat woodworking chisel and it's nice to have the right tool designed for cutting wood block or lino cut but you can improvise that'll do with the flattening for now i'm going to go in on the detail here now and i'm still using a u-shape tool and i'm going to start going in and using the side of the tool almost just work my way up to the edge of those hearts instinct tells you that you need a fine v tool to do this but actually a utor will give a better result because you can use the side of the tool and just take your time to work your way up to the block without crumbling it and that's especially important when you're isolating small shapes like this with a lot of line and cut away around them because you do have to cut the liner away quite deep if you were cutting around small shapes and there wasn't a big area of cutaway lino around them so let's say you were cutting lines into a block you wouldn't need to go anything like as deep but here i do so i really want to be careful that i don't crumble away the lino while i'm working so using the side of the tool and just coming up to the edge really keeps things clean and tidy and you'll see that i'm not fiddling my way around each individual heart as i go i'm more treating it as a sort of multiple process where i'm doing all the cuts in one direction at once and then going back on myself and i find that's a sort of easier way to work it's a quicker way and it helps you to get into a rhythm of cutting as well some of these little hearts i might actually sort of edit as i go and just cut them to get rid of any imperfections in the drawing and just improve their shape and that's easy to see with this combination of the black ink and the stained lining i can really see what i'm doing quite closely here and i quite like that there's a variation in the heart some are nice and sort of fattened round and some are much little skinnier so now i've started refining these i'm going to refine yet again and go back and take out some of the spare material up at the top and i've done it this way around where i cleaned out this large area and then started focusing on those because i find it easier without the distraction of the rest of the lino and of course with all that pink gone it's really obvious which bits you're working on so that's the way around i'm working for this particular uh project i might not work that way always but i just find it visually easier to get rid of all the big expansive pink so i can hone in on the details here and i'm going to go to a bigger u just to get rid of some of this excess lining so i'm still using new tools i haven't used a v tool yet for this because i find that with a utool doing this sort of work you're far less likely to get lots of crumbly lino that's a bit i've missed so so and when you're doing little tiny just taking off little tiny details like that just be careful that you don't crack the surface of the liner just take your time and allow the stuff the tool to slide at the beginning of the cut rather than ramming it into the liner because you can actually sort of crack apart the surface if you're not careful it is important to have sharp tools and we have some lovely films on tool sharpening i'll put the series numbers into the description but it's in the reduction lino with laura series of play on the playlists okay now it's time for my v tool and i have a v tool here it's quite a wide v but i'm i like it because i can use it almost like a stamp to take out that top of the heart shape and you see how i'm holding the tool up and going down nipping out that central v again i don't want the lino to crumble and this is doing a clean swift cut that's keeping everything tidy i'll go back and refine that cup in a moment do the refining part where you tidy everything up is really important and it's actually the difference between a really good printed image and a slightly scruffy one so being patient and just taking the time to really refine detail cuts like this it's really important it's the difference between it looking really polished and excellent for the print and looking scruffy so you know put something good on to listen to and settle down and get comfortable and just take the time needed to get everything as it should be so now i have my hearts here but it's also quite ridgy so i'm going to do a little bit of tidying up with a bigger u gouge so now i've finished cutting i'm going to give this a good brushing and make sure i get rid of all these little bits and bobs i'm also going to check that i don't have any hairy bits of the jute from around the edge get rid of those and then the block will be ready to print i hope you found that useful and don't forget to subscribe if you'd like to see all the films in the series and you want to make sure that you don't miss any and if you've liked the video please press the like button thanks a lot and i'll see you again you

Channel: Laura Boswell

Views: 1,899

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: linocut, reliefprinting, linocut printing, linocut techniques, laura boswell, lino cutting, printing press, linocut multiple colour, linocut reduction, linocut inking, linocut registration, printing ink extender, lino printing, lino printing layers, lino multi block, lino multiple blocks, tabletop print, lino printing at home, lino tutorial, lino for beginners, woodblock, woodgrain

Id: UyCyEWYYnNQ

Length: 26min 12sec (1572 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021