Reduction Lino Printing

I cut my first colour out of a 30 x 30 piece of lino, taking a bit off around the edges to ensure it fit comfortably inside the mount of the frame. I tried to cut the outer circle as best as I could with the linocutting tools but then cut away the excess lino with some scissors to leave jagged edges. I didn't want the whole piece of lino to be perfectly round because this would have made it really difficult to line up properly for the second colour. The edge of the print should still look nice and round though. 

I took a piece of A2 photocopier paper and drew out one corner of where I would line up my paper, I then placed the lino where I would want it to sit on the piece of paper and drew around it, making sure to mark on all the details of the imperfections. When it came to putting this in the press, I could use these markings to make sure the circle was in exactly the same place. There is probably a much more effective way of doing this which is much neater but this was working for me so I was happy. 

I had a bit of an issue with the inks seeing as there was no white pot of the normal inks used for lino printing. I spoke to the print room staff and they said that etching ink would work just fine and would still mix with the other type of ink. I found that the etching ink was a lot runnier and the white didn't seem to be as strong so the colour didn't end up as pale as I actually wanted it to be, even though I kept adding more and more white it didn't seem to be making enough of a difference. I did a few tests and continued to add more white until I reached a colour I thought would work okay.

After printing about eighteen of these, I stopped and cleaned everything up so I could cut out the next stage of my reduction lino. This is my outline with black ink on ready to be printed from in the press. I am using the registration sheet from before to line up my lino and the corner of the pages I am printing onto, I'm not sure its very clear on the photo but the lines are drawn on in pencil. 

The first few attempts were okay but not perfectly on the mark, I started to spend more time making sure each one was lined up correctly and I did get a few which I thought were almost perfectly lined up. It was typical that as soon as I started making prints that were lined up as they should be, I realised that I actually preferred the ones that were slightly off-registered. Overall, I was happy with most of my prints and thought I had done well seeing as this was only my second attempt at a reduction lino. 

I do feel that I may have rushed my cutting a bit because I was feeling the pressure of my workload a lot but I am glad I chose to do this process rather than print my existing design digitally, I would have just ended up feeling like I should have put more effort in if I hadn't done these lino prints.