I’ve had a large project in the back of my head for a while. It’s been brewing there while I trawled through various other projects that were much faster to execute, with more instant gratification involved. But it finally came to the front of the queue in my head two weeks ago, so I went off and bought myself a HUGE block of lino.
I choose to work with the Japanese lino as it is better suited to the jigsaw style of block which was something I knew I wanted to try with this Poppies project.
It took me a full day, and then a few half days, to carve this block and during which many podcasts were listened to. After running a few test prints in a water-based black ink (which kept beading on the surface of the lino frustratingly) and then in an oil-based Ultramarine ink (little bit of beading but nowhere near as bad), I spent a day fastidiously clearing the background of the block so there would be no ‘chatter’ to pick up ink like you can see in the blue test print.
FYI I was struggling with a flat chisel to clear the background and lamented out loud in front of the married Other the fact it kept digging deep into the lino and causing me issues. It was VERY quickly suggested to me that I should just flip the chisel over. Bit of a face palm/epiphany moment…
Spent another day playing with ink, mixing colours, working out gradients, testing papers and seeing how the inking and ‘jigsawing’ process would work. I still have some experimenting to do with the central stamen of the open poppy – think I’m going to use a sponge to add some lighter tones there. I had to test on A3 sized paper because that’s all I had to hand, but I will be running final prints onto something larger, probably closer to A2 to give the print a bit of breathing space – like the Ultramarine test print shown here.
Some gorgeous Indian Khadi paper is on order – next stage will be coming soon!
Megan Abel 