Weddingbee

During my broadcast last night, my friend Kim was talking about the joys of linoblocking. Since I did some of it in high school myself, I figured I would put together a little post explaining what it is and how you can do it for those of you who might want to give it a shot.

Just a little start up info – Lino is essentially a little block of a linoleum substance. Usually when you buy it, it’s around an eighth of an inch thick and has kind of a gum eraser texture to it. Though it’s got a rougher aesthetic then a gocco does for printing, it is significantly less expensive and you can still produce some pretty cool prints for things like invitations, favour boxes, programs, and out of town bags. Plus, artists like Picasso and Matisse worked with it, so it does have a time tested quality to it.

Anyway, let’s jump into the supplies you need (I’m including pictures of the supplies you might not be able to identify if you’ve never done this before):

1. A piece of lino that will fit the design you want to produce.

 
2. A pencil to etch out the design

3. A set of lino cutting tools which usually contains a thick wooden handle to grip onto for safety and a variety of different cutting heads.

4. A tube of your desired inking colour.

5. A brayer/small roller with a roller head that is preferably made out rubber. (You do not want to use a wooden roller head because it is a porous material and will likely absorb some of your printing ink which could either affect how your ink spreads or ruin your next round of printing.)

6. Some scrap paper.

7. A printing surface.

8. A block of wood (Optional)

Got everything? Let’s start the lino!

The first thing you need to do is to decide what design you want to print and draw it onto your piece of lino with a pencil. If you’re anything like me and can’t draw, a neat thing to do is to get a design from your computer and heavily trace its edges with a pencil. Then, place it face down on your lino and trace the design from the back of the paper to transfer the image onto the lino itself.

Once you’ve got your design worked out, pick the cutting head that you think will work best with the design you’ve chosen and start to cut. Generally, you want to cut out all the negative space of your design, meaning the things or spaces in your design that you do not want to print. You don’t need to carve too deep into the lino or hard since the lino is fairly soft and will fall away pretty easily.

For more printing stability, especially with a larger design, you might want to affix your finished sheet of lino to a block of wood since the lino can be a bit bendy on its own, but this is not completely necessary, so if you don’t have it, just skip it.

Now that you’ve finished carving your design, squirt a little of your lino ink onto a separate surface like a glass tray or piece of cardboard. Do not squirt your printing ink directly onto your lino because it will over-saturate it or onto a printed surface like a newspaper since it could possibly reactivate the printing in the paper and ruin your inking colour.

Once you’ve got the ink out, roll your brayer/roller into it until you’ve got the roller head covered in your colour.

From there, roll the brayer/roller onto your lino block until you’ve covered your desired printing area. To avoid over saturation and to check that your lino is printing the way you want it to, it is good, especially when you start, to do a little blot of your lino on a scrap piece of paper before you print on your final product.

Now that you’ve got your printing surface covered in ink, press it down onto your final product much like you would a traditional stamp and voila! You’ve done your first linoblock print!

Once you get the hang of it, you can do more complicated designs or multiple printed layers or even blend your inks to add more visual interest to your products like these prints.

Try it out and enjoy! Even if you don’t end up using it for your wedding, at the very least, it could be nice crafting break from the craziness of planning.

** Many thanks to the lovely Jesse Breytenbach of http://jezzeblog.blogspot.com/ whose demo pictures I used within for this post. Not only is she a freelance illustrator and a comic artist, but she’s also supercrafty which makes me embarrassed that my kind of creativity generally involves coloured macaroni and glitter.**

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