I thought to make another single colour linocut to expand on Project 6, taking up the inspiration from Man Ray’s rayograph compositions. I was thinking towards a simple still life that would work on object shapes rather than intricate detail.

My starting point was one of the apple and cinnamon muffins I had made that day – I broke it in half and arranged it on a plate, together with a napkin and a fork, and a coffee mug. I made a first drawing on A4 white paper and a second my A4 brown paper sketchbook, but the sketches did not convince me. I found it hard to get the proportions right and didn’t manage to draw the muffin to make it recognizable. I concluded the composition was too complex and then could no longer resist the muffin.

    

Next try was a still life with coffee mug, sketchbooks, pencils and eraser. For this I chose a small sketchbook, slightly larger than A5, with the intention of forcing me to simplify and clean up by not having enough space to go into much detail.. The drawing worked quite well although I suspected the tiny elements in the pencils might be too fine for a linocut. I began working out the idea by making another drawing sized down to my A5 lino plate.

    

I found the composition interesting and hoped that I’d be able to find a solution for the pencil details. I continued with a chalk drawing on black paper and decided to have a go with lino as well. This time I made the transfer drawing on tracing paper by hand, not as previously using a photocopy, by taking an outline from the A5 pencil drawing. Then I reversed it and used carbon paper to get it onto the lino.

    

I took a proof with 2B graphite stick on rice paper. I found there was not enough differentiation in the lower part of the composition, where the elements were placed on the table. The pencils and the eraser were difficult to recognize. As I had read forward to Project 7, multi-colour linocut, I came up with the idea of adding another colour to this linoprint, to make the elements stand out better from the table.

I went ahead as described in Project 7 by taking a black print off the plate and transferring the image onto a second linoplate while the ink was still wet on the paper. To my surprise, the impression was not bad at all and the pencils came out nicely. Maybe this has to do with our viewing habits from left-to-right, so the different orientation of the print compared to the proof was easier to read. I took two more prints on bright white, smooth A4 drawing paper and another one on a slightly larger printmaking paper (11×14 inches/ 27.5 x 35 cm). That format works really well as it gives almost even margins around the A5 print.

    

After having cut the second plate, I chose a warm brown as my second colour. I decided to start with fresh prints and use brown as first colour because I thought it would look nicer to print black on top of the brown ink, rather than to print brown over black.

After the first brown print, I immediately added the second layer in black because I wanted to see whether the print worked. Before printing, I corrected the black plate slightly because there had been a pattern to the right top of the mug which I did not want to have there. This had to do with my composition which had a white upper background and no printed areas to stabilize the linoplate. So my cutting marks became visible. I had deliberately chosen a large flat gauge for this area, so the pattern was half-intended. But it made me aware that a linocut composition might need some elements in large white areas to prevent too many of the cutting marks  getting onto the paper.

After the first print, I went on with 12 more brown prints, choosing different paper types but staying with the A4 paper format. I started with Fabriano Accademia drawing paper, natural white, 200 gsm. The first print was a bit misaligned, and to compare I’m including another one where alignment worked better.

    

Registration became an issue, because the two A5 plates were not exactly the same size, which I only realized after printing the second colour. I tried to balance this out a bit by hand with more or less success.

Here I printed on coloured, indian paper handmade from cotton rags, 150 gsm. The colour was beige-brown, but the hue does not come out in the photo (photoshopping did not help). I also tried thin natural white mulberry paper (45 gsm). The paper is nice, but somewhat transparent and the ink bleeds through to the other side. From this experience, I prefer heavier paper for linocuts.

    

The method of placing the linoplate onto the paper, inked side down, did not work for me at all because my fingers got spotted with ink and the plate bent, and I wasn’t able to hold it well enough to get it nicely on the print. So finally I came up with the solution of using an A3 paper, extending the orientation lines of the A5 linoplate to the outer edges, and using these lines to register the hand-made papers with deckled edges over the linoplate.

Using this method, I printed three white handmade paper sheets with deckled edges, like the one included here. I think it worked out relatively well. Interestingly, I discovered that the handmade papers seem to have an orientation. They seem to look better in one direction, compared to the other. I think I made my print on the paper in the wrong direction – I should have turned it so that the lower edge with the large deckles was on the top. The effect has to do with how the light falls onto the textured surface of the paper. It is minimal but I’ll be aware of it in the future.

Another nice detail I discovered while working on this print was that the brown print embossed my cutting pattern into the paper. I was using a printing press, otherwise it might not have happened. When I printed the black layer on top, the black ink did not reach the embossed parts and so there are some brown spots within the black area of the sketchbook. It’s only a small effect and can hardly be seen in the enlarged photos, but is better visible in the actual prints. For future reference, I made single colour prints of both plates to complete the series.

    

Some concluding reflections

Overall, I’m quite happy that I worked on this series, because I now feel a bit more prepared to tackle a multicolour linoprint. I’ve had a taster of the difficulties when working with more than one colour.

I quite like the effects of my cutting marks in the “empty” areas. Maybe I shouldn’t have cut away the entire upper area. I could have treated the upper area a bit more like the lower area on the black plate, where I have left the original surface intact between my cut marks. It might have given a bit more control over how the upper area would actually print.

For the multicolour print to come, I’ll take much care with registration and will try to compensate for those slight size differences in my pre-cut lino plates.