DIY Lino Printing

Or rather, cuttingmat printing. Linoleum is expensive, I'm a poor student, and the ACTION cuttingmats are so weak they're great for linocutting C: After a long time of cussing and swearing at the cut itself, I've fallen back in love with the printing. It's quite unpredictable when doing it at home without a press - this was all printed on my floor, with a mixture of ink, water and acrylic paint. It was a very interesting experiment, and I'd actually love to do this again sometime. I think I've got the hang of it.

Remember the Cardboard Robots I had to make for class? We had to make a lino print inspired by them, and I took my big galopping beastie as my inspiration. I wanted to take a more abstract approach, something I don't do quite often, as the technique is very suitable for thsi approach. So, let's go!

First off, the angle I took my inspiration from. Just a random photo I took of my beastie to loosely base my lino upon:

And then it's time for printing! For these prints I mixed together water, ink and blue and red acrylic paint. It was somewhat tricky to find the right consistency to keep the paper from sticking (as is what happened in the third print), but it was a fun process overall.

The textures the hand-printing caused on the paper is very interesting! I really think I'm going to try using this technique more - I'm going to be looking for excuses to do this for class! Click on the images to enlarge the photos, so you can see the lovely textures. Even the mishap of the paper sticking in the third print caused a very interesting visual effect.

And that's it, for now! You can be certain you'll be seeing more of this technique in the future, it's grown on me! Quick, gimme an excuse to do it more! See you all soon!