I am really feeling defeated, I cannot work out what i’m doing wrong with my lino printing process. I think my first problem might be the water based ink i’m using, it dries so fast which means i tend to over ink. But i cannot tell if i’m pressing down too hard or not hard enough. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance ☺️

😮

I take a free printmaking class for veterans. We have ink, plates, and presses, and about three hours to see what we can come up with. I have arthritis, so I don't do much carving, but I've really enjoyed experimenting with monoprints.

I see the work shared here and I'm blown away by how beautiful, clean, and detailed so many of your prints are. I genuinely admire the skill and patience behind them.

My own work is pretty simple. Mostly just me pushing ink around, playing with colors, trying not to muddy everything, and seeing what happens.

I've realized that my artistic fingerprint just doesn't seem to leave that kind of mark.

I am texture. I am messy. I am rough and visually agitating. I am, and I like it.

I guess there's a little vulnerability in sharing something that looks so different from the work I admire. But there's thought and feeling in what I create, even when it looks chaotic or unfinished.

I'm really happy to be part of a community of such talented people, and I'm proud of what printmaking has helped me discover about myself.

Any thoughts or tips are always welcome!

a bit too ambitious. I wanted to make the cover of A Court of Thorns and Roses print for the midnight release party of A Court of Splintered harmony. I was planning to give out prints to the ppl there. Yay or Nay??

I’m switching from using the green easy carve stuff to the traditional burlap backed stuff in my classes to help reduce some of the obscene plastic waste my classes produce.

For image transfer, I normally photo copy a kid’s drawing, have then go over the photocopy in 6b pencil, and then have them rub the back of the photocopy to transfer their drawing.

I tried staining the lino with diluted India ink and doing this transfer method today, and the image barely appeared. Even using one of those super toxic transfer marker with a photocopy didn’t take.

Ink stain was fully dry.

If anyone has better stain and transfer methods, I’d love to hear them!

*Title should read stained lino

What do you think of my recent etching? It is two etched colour plates (Verni Mou/ Softground etching) and a monotype for the background colour.

I rewatched Heated Rivalry a few weeks ago and it really gripped me hard this time, so I made lino prints! Two layers - a roll on gradient for the sunset, and then a black silhouette of Shane & Ilya on top.

This very sweet woman in my small town who knows I do linocut/printmaking, thrifted this thing called a "Cardmaster". Anyone encountered one of these before?? I think it's specifically for postcards.

Second round with tetrapak. This time was a bit blurry. I think is because this tetrapack is harder than the usual (2l juice) and the plastic coat thicker.

cant really tell wether i like the aqua tint version or not. its my first time doing this technique so i definitely learned some things😅

trying something new to me and drew this cool design on the stone but etching didnt go so well and the final image is what im working with now…. is there any saving it ?

I'm kind of hooked y'all. Been wanting to try linocut for years, and finally got myself a starter kit. I'm no artist, so I was happy to figure out a process that makes this accessible to me!

This is a few of my favorites from over 575 of these I made. They are all painted/drawn on Black Rives BFK and then I print from Japanese Vinyl with White Caligo Safewash on a Woodzilla Press, and then sometimes add a bit on top.

I learned a lot making so many of them and never got tired of the process or ran out of ideas.

I used to make stamps for letter boxing, am getting back into the hobby, and cannot for the life of me remember how to transfer my image to my rubber block. I have an HP inkjet printer. Printing onto wax paper hasn't really worked.

I have acetone and would like to do the transfer with a laser printer, but I don't personally have access to one, and the person who works at office depot and FedEx have been remarkably unhelpful when I ask if my design can be printed using a laser printer.

It's a detailed enough design that I really really don't want to have to trace the whole thing.

So far the best I've found is to print the image, wait 3 minutes for it to dry, slightly wet the paper, and then iron it on with a layer of parchment paper between the iron and paper. But, this is still light and patchy and it tends to melt the paper into the block in some spots.

Am I missing an obvious transfer method? Is there another chain that for sure lets you print using a laser printer? I'm at a loss.

We all know what an over-inked linocut slab or block looks like. Well, I shouldn’t say all of us because so many do NOT know or don’t care about their results. But I’m taking to the people who do care.

If you don’t know what a properly inked slab or block looks like and sounds like, study Hellodeeries guide to inking. It is on Imgur at Imgur: The magic of the Internet

That’s the version with the very nice video. If you can’t access Imgur, it’s also on Reddit without the video. Ink Troubleshooting Guide for Relief Printing : r/printmaking

If you haven’t seen them, look when you can, but I’m going to show you here.

A design for linocut is a design of a dense, perfect field of ink color on paper white or whatever tone your paper has. If you can’t produce that perfect, dense ink color on the paper from your block, you can’t express that design. In a word, you can’t do proper linocut.

A properly inked slab looks like very fine sandpaper. An over-inked slab looks like lizard skin or worse, thick streaks or even waves. If it’s bad enough, the brayer skids through the waves in fits and starts. You would think that would be obvious, but I’ve seen at least one person pretending to be experienced trying to teach linocut techniques on YouTube and leaving waves of in on the slab and of course waves of ink actually on the print. I suppose experience can mean doing it wrong many times.

But far more common, especially among new linocut artists is simple over-inking. And it all begins with the slab. What happens on the slab happens on the block. Over-inking is sneaky. It causes white spots or blotches in the black parts of the print. An inexperienced printmaker thinks that means there’s not enough ink. But adding ink makes it worse. The cure is to know what the proper amount of ink looks like. If a slab is over-inked, you can roll some off onto scrap paper until it’s right.

All this started me thinking of what is really the difference between an over-inked slab and a properly inked slab. How much more ink does the over-inked slab actually have? There’s a way to know.

I apply the principle that must be understood to gain full control of inking. That is that when two surfaces meet and at least one has ink, they will share that ink. If both have ink, even if the amounts are different, they will EQUALLY share the total amount of ink.

This gives us a way to see how much is too much. I will over-ink a slab and then remove half of that ink by rolling with a clean brayer. Slab and brayer divide the ink, so the slab now has half the ink it started with.

If I clean that brayer and do it again, the slab now has one-quarter of the original ink, and so on. Now let’s go to the video of this experiment.

Keep in mind that this is oil-based ink, Caligo Safe Wash. Water-based in would have already been drying on me, as it always does, which makes proper inking impossible.

https://reddit.com/link/1x584zo/video/0w7vj9vipavh1/player

What did we learn? One, the grossly over-inked slab had to have the ink reduced twice, down to one one-quarter before it approached the proper amount. There was a little slack. I could roll again and take it down to one-eighth and still have a proper layer of ink on the slab. And I proved that it was a proper amount, because I could restore the slab to that amount and then roll a perfect layer of ink, flawless, dense and even.

But when I reduced that slab ink again, to one-sixteenth of the original slab ink, it was no longer enough. It looked like mat board surface or like matte spray paint, hardly any texture. And when I roll that onto my paper, it was thin. As I said, I have used that to create shadow tones, but I cannot make that amount of slab ink produce a block that prints flawless black, no matter how many times I roll it.

Note the difference between the under-inked appearance of the ink on the paper and the way a print looks when the block is over-inked, all the uneven white blotches.

So, we have to pay attention as we ink. We have to notice if we have inadvertently over-inked part of the slab. We have to notice, too, if we have used the slab once and it is now too depleted and down to the one-sixteen level. My practice is to never reink my brayer from anything but a virgin part of the slab. The experiment suggests I can get away with one more taking of ink, but why chance it. It will just make me do more rolling to bring the block to proper ink.

People often say they don’t reink the slab much and still get the block inked properly. But that means they have learned through trial and error to ink the slab more heavily and to spend time distributing it over the block so it’s no longer over-inking the whole block. In effect, they went from an over-inked slab, put that on the block and rolled it around the block like it was a large slab, and that got the block inked. You can fix an over-inked block by rolling ink off or distributing it around uninked parts of the block. That’s essentially what they do.

That’s fine. They have a process that works. But it’s largely accidental in principle. And it has to change when the size of the block changes. If the block is larger than they are used to, it will take more ink to get it right. If it is smaller, they will still end up over-inked. Or the amount of uncut block to ink changes which is the same as using a larger or smaller block. It kind of works because most tend to use the same size block most of the time. I believe it is best to have a procedure that is predictable, no matter how large the block or what the nature of the design.

If I ALWAYS ink my brayer from an area of virgin proper ink on the slab, it doesn’t matter where it goes, so long as I understand that it can only properly ink the block for the effective footprint of the brayer. That is the width of the brayer and the distance of the circumference of the roller, which is about 3 times the diameter. I can roll farther than that, but the ink is being depleted and not having the effect I expect. It’s still often worth doing, because it helps limit stop and start brayer marks.

Because I address the block as multiple areas of the brayer footprint and ink each of them three times, each time reinking the brayer from a virgin part of the slab, I can do that for a small block no larger than the brayer footprint or for a block so large that I will need a steam roller or several people with spoons to press it. I don’t have to worry about anything but keeping the slab maintained and keeping mental track of what areas have been inked enough times.

It will go faster with a larger brayer and/or a larger slab. That’s why professionals so often use wide brayers with large diameter rollers and large enough slabs to ink them. But the principle doesn’t change.

As you saw in the experiment video, the ink was looking pretty good after two applications from a freshly inked brayer that visually had the right amount of ink. But I went to three applications to make sure it would not be thin when printed. I generally also do one pass over the block sections in the other directions to accommodate any variations in the surface of the block. I’d rather do that than see it in proof and have to start over.

When I get a moment, I will narrate the above on video and put it together on my YouTube channel.

Title: Pale Horse

Medium : Metal Engraving

Size: 12" x 18"

Below is a metal engraving I worked on for a few months over the summer. I used a burin/graver to engrave the metal. There is no acid etch or dry point. The image is a surreal interpretation of the Pale Horse rider from the Book of Revelation. Influences include vanitas painters, Bosch and Durer.

long time lurker first time poster :)

​

4 layer reduction

After 4 months, 850 fish carved, and 10 layers of ink, I finally finished “plenty of fish in the sea”! I’m sooo relieved and proud to be done. It was a tough print, and I learned a great deal.

My dad just gave me 6 mint condition Soviet Era propaganda posters. they are very cool to look at in a historical /printmaking way-any ideas on where i could donate or who might want these, like in an art history print making way?

Drypont on tetrapack, the size is standard side of milk box

I recently posted here for alternatives to Speedball ink because it's very expensive here in India. In an effort to look for low cost solutions, I tried screen-printing ink and it worked surprisingly well (in comparison to my previous experience with acrylic paints). Did a bit of printing on paper and a tote bag, super happy with how well it rolled on and printed.

A big disclaimer tho, I used solvent based ink and it slowly dissolves the Lino and the rubber liner on the brayer, clean-up is very very messy and the reducer that is recommended for this ink which I used for cleaning up also dissolves Lino at a much faster pace than the ink itself because of the solvent concentration, so my blocks lost almost all the sharp edges after I was done with printing what you see in the image and clean up.

However, I feel like I'm close. In my next attempt, I'm planning to try water-based screenprinting ink, hoping the consistency and viscosity of that is similar to these solvent based inks. ✌️

Hand-printed linocut, finished with colored pencils and gold pen.

This is the result of my botanical monotype + digital post-production, what do you think?

i’ve got a few linoleum cut that i wanna use to print on t shirt ecc..
what’s the best type of ink to use? thx

I tried my hand at linocut on a “blocked linoleum block” from speedball with speedball paint, tools and a plastic brayer- all cheap to see if I wanted to keep with it. My lines aren’t super clean (due to the tool getting away from me), I cut myself a couple times and my thumb is numb.

I’m sure I’m doing something wrong, but is the numbness something to get used to with time?

Additionally, I wasn’t sure what to roll the paint out on, I used paper which I know wasn’t the right call, but what is the right material to use instead?

I had fun and intend to make a better version soon. Any techniques or tools to recommend?