I came across this young Spanish artist on the Linocut friends facebook group, where he posted images of a recent linocut he made. The linocut explores a graphical subject with a 4-colour C-M-Y-K transparent overprinting technique. I was fascinated by the colour effects and thought I might build on this in the next project.

The artist posted images from the stages over the development as well as detail sections of the print, which I find helpful in understanding the build-up of colours.

The 4 linocut blocks:

It was also very interesting to see where the ideas for the subject came from. In a subsequent discussion, the artist posted photos that documented the sources of his memories on which he later built the composition.

Seeing this, I thought I might take a similar approach in the next project, using the suicide linocut technique and multiple colours. It is also an example of how I might trace back my own sources of inspiration that can develop into subjects for prints.

The pictures made me aware that I might have neglected developing ideas for prints for a while. I’m actually a “hobby photographer” and often go through phases of “increased visual awareness”, when I’m out with a camera. It’s a state of altered perception which makes me focus on visual stimuli. When for example I see a traffic light, I look at it not in terms of the information it conveys about the traffic situation, but in therms of its visuals – the shapes and colours of the object, contrast to background etc. When I’m in this mode I usually take a lot of pictures that might look random to an outsider, but they capture the little visual sets I happened to come across.

Unfortunately nowadays I’m mostly stressed, busy and in a hurry when I go outside – having to go to work or to the supermarket, or I’m going to the dentist, etc, so never seem to be in the mode for visual journeys. Or maybe I manage a trip outside, taking pictures, but then afterwards I don’t find the time to work out what I found and develop it further. But at least for now I realized that there’s something I might get back to.

I’m going to re-read the brief for the next project, but if I remember correctly the task was to combine printmaking techniques. A densely composed, 4-colour linoprint would probably  become overloaded if I just added more techniques for the sake of themselves.

I think I’ll develop more ideas along the way once I’ve started the project, and will see whether it’s going to correspond to the subject idea I’ll be choosing.