Printmaking Relief Practice.

Well, I got out my carving tools, my brayer, and the ink. I decided to start with a simple shape that's soon to become relevant: candy corn. I thought that if I came up with some neat little cards, someone would want them for the holiday. ;)

Carving the linoleum is by far the hardest part of the process. Drawing the design and transferring it is pretty easy, but once you get to relieving it's rough. I'd already nicked myself a bit before my honey rushed to get me his super-stuffed skiing glove for protection.

The main thing to remember is a steady hand goes a long way. Also, keeping too much tension from entering your carving hand, otherwise you'll end up hurting your muscles. But I worked with what I had. Here's some pictures of the experiment, which ultimately ending up being fun. Patrick liked watching.

That is the result of a 3x4" linoleum block, painstakingly carved to represent candy corn. I decided to experiment with keeping contour lines and extra nicks to give it a special touch. To the right is the design repeated on orange construction paper. Rice paper is generally the best for printmaking, but I'm not going to buy any until class requires it.

Here are some tools shown. On the bottom left is the brayer, used to roll the ink onto the block. Moving up you can see a glass pan turned upside down: the best object I could find for putting my oil-based ink on and rolling (mostly cleaned off by using cooking oil). At the top, almost cut off, is my cutter, loaded with the C-blade.

Close-up of the orange construction paper print.

These are the little cards I made from the design. I really like how they turned out. The candy shows up well, especially the contours, but the empty spaces and blotches give it a nice style. I tried doing some color on one, pretty neat though messy. Any takers? ;D They're available for purchase now at my Etsy store.

I think, with time and patience, I'll come to enjoy this form of art. The cutting will always be the frustrating part... and inking enough.

My sketchbook from the SB Project will have to wait a while before I pick up on it again.