work in progress continued...

I like lino prints; the effect created by flat blocks of colour and sharp lines. But I've not had much practice at making my own prints, and I always find it a bit hard to wrap my head around what to cut when... so this week I've been trying to improve my technique a bit...

The process of cutting a reduction lino plate (like this one) really feels to go against my instincts; the instincts that lead me to hoarding and wanting to keep things as they are. I find it hard to cut into the plate that I've just printed in order to start the next layer, what if I cut it wrong and ruin it? What if I make it worse?? It gets harder the more layers a print has, by the third layer I'm really having to force myself to make the cut and then print over the already-quite-nice-looking prints... But its the same for any artist I suppose, perhaps the point is that risks must be taken, perhaps something quite-nice must be destroyed to create something good... 

Its still hard though!

So, above is the plate from yesterday (and to answer your question from yesterday Barbara, its a lino plate, but looking at the image today, I think it works quite well as it is. Hmmm, something to think about...) in its various stages...

And some of the prints...

I think, in the end, the fourth layer (the outline) didn't work so well. The line is too heavy, I like the images best without it (which  is kind of lucky because halfway through printing the last layer the beak snapped off, then the toe, so I guess thats the end of that!)

This print was also an experiment in colour. I don't have much experience with colour mixing (what with most of my prints being black and my books being white :) ) I sometimes find the many decisions that need to be made overwhelming (and it ends up brown), and with a four layer print the combinations from even a few colours become incomprehensible to me. so I really tried to limit myself, and although I'm not entirely happy with the end results, I feel a little more confident about trying again.

P.S. I know its annoying but I've turned on the little spam protection letters on the comments. Dodgy spam comments had started to appear, and thats no good, so hopefully the letters will put a halt to that...