Single colour linocut
Plan, cut and print an image where cuts will print as the colour of the paper and the lino ridges will be the colour of the ink.
The theme is place, I live and work in the New Forest, summer is the worst time of year, full of tourists yes, but everywhere is just green, durgy green, admittedly the heather is now starting to appear with its purple flecks, give it a couple more weeks and the intensity of the purple even colours the sky, and the New Forest honey will taste of the scent of heather. Spring & Autumn are the best times here, the energy of fresh spring, the green of new growth and the autumnal warmth and colours of leaves, bracken and berries.
Today I went down to the coast at Milford and then this weekend I am escaping and off to the beach and coastal creeks around Chichester harbour, it will be interesting to see what I discover and what inspires, but I’m thinking beach huts, deck chairs, windbreaks, the coast will be my theme of place.
Visual material, sketches, thoughts and idea exploring and supporting my theme. Or not!
Mmmmm.., its not doing much for me, bright colours yes, but not something that would translate to a single colour linocut, hinges, locks, windows etc are defining and contrasting elements. The right hand picture offers more possibilities with the ladder and its lovely portholes, adds some character. The man in the hut next door had a large can of paint so I could add that and a brush. The shadow in the foreground is from the back of a deckchair so I could incorporate that as well. Something for the future, but not for now.
Another day; I’m walking the creeks around Chidham and looking over towards Bosham, the tide is very low, mundane mud flats and slimey seaweed, but to my right are fields of baled hay, working tracors and the remains of cut crops. On the edges between field and creek are an amazing assortment of flowers and seed heads.
This is more what I am looking for, it’s more me, more nature. I work in forestry conservation, but skills are transferable, I don’t need beach huts and deckchairs. My sketches remind me a bit (much less detail) of those images of Angie Lewin, blocks of colour, with the finer details of nature, maybe I am influenced!
Inspired by my afternoon at the creek, I’ve done a bit of a word search / mind map. Key words that stand out: marshes, creeks, wildlife, plants, boats, mud, pebbles, boats, birds.
Now I’m down at East & West Wittering beach, the tides out and I’m walking on the sand along the waters edge. There are plenty of pebbles above the tide line, a bank of pebble beach. But its the seaweed that draws my attention, amazing colours, movement, shapes, form; some laying on the sand, some attached to pebbles and others waving in the motion of the water.
At the back of the beach its all pebbles and sand dunes with long wavy grasses. I make a little collection to study.
I have just done some research in respect of artists that have included the coast, pebbles and seaweed in their work. The artists I have looked at are Angie Lewin, Matisse and Hetty Haxworth. I have made some relevant notes on my Research page.
White Alga 1947 
Aqueous VI 
Blue Skimming Stones 
Pebble Shore 
Northern Shore
I went back to Cutmill Creek today, the tide was coming in and I made a couple of very rough sketches. There was so much going on. Bosham church in the background, sailing dingies bobbing on their moorings, the remains of an old pontoon protruding from the mud, gulls on posts, hundreds of swans in the foreground and as the water came in the little drainage channels looked like some of the wavy seaweed that I’d seen previously. What the difference a tide makes!
Developing my ideas.
Inspired by the work of Hetty Haxworth I have decided to develop a linocut based on the beach and it’s pebbles. As Hetty’s work is in colour, using solid blocks, I have asked myself the question “how will I translate the patterns on pebbles with a single colour print“?
I think that my ideas will translate to single colour as long as I can add the necessary textures and marks with different cutting techniques and I have taken influence from the marks of Angie Lewin.
Mark making exercises and sketches in sketchbook.
How to move forward. I could just draw my pebbles as in the above sketch but felt I needed something a bit looser and organic! and to further explore their pattern and texture. Thinking back to my tutors suggestion of ‘go big’ and ‘collage’, and possibly inspired by the research I’d made of Sandra Blow, I drew circles & lines on a sheet of A2 (blind and with non-drawing hand).
I then studied the marks I’d made and highlighted the ones that I wanted to keep with a heavy duty marker and felt pen. Note: there is no pattern to the colours, it was just changed as the pen ran out of ink.
In hindsight, I should have drawn in pencil and filled in with the black marker pen. It would have saved me time in the next part of the exercise. I photcopied the drawing (not easy A2 on an A4 copier) then cut out pebbles, selected and deselected based on their marks and features of interest and re-arranged them as an A3 collage.
Using white & black wax crayon and black felt pen I drew over the marks in white and filled the pebbles with black ink. This was then photocopied as original size and on reduction giving me an A3 & A4. It was interesting to see the marks that the printer had generated from my use of different tools, the base colour coming through and the sellotape that had been used to hold the various sheets together.
My lino is A4 in size (something else for the shopping list, larger sheets), so the dilema, work from the A4 or find an interesting piece of the A3 by using a mask. I chose the latter as my starting point.
There is an exercise in the course notes that asks students to make a sketch of their design on black paper using chalk, I tried this without much success, I just seemded to end up with a mess of blobs and lines and hoped that this wasn’t how my linocut was going to turn out. In theory my collage was doing the same thing, I guess, but as an extra test I made a small test plate from which I lifted 3 prints.
I seemed to get the effect that I was looking for and more, I finally see the spaces as the tidal channels that form part of the creek behind the beach. Some neater cutting required, add a few small pebbles in the larger white spaces, and take a free view on cutting in the textures based on my mark making notes above.
My first proofing wasn’t very successful, and my first thoughts were that my cuts weren’t deep enough, then I thought that maybe the paper too thick, which it turns out it was, proofing with thinner cartridge paper gave bold clear results. Fingers crossed that the prints will be as good.
As seems to be the norm for me my first print lacked ink, by print 3 I was happy with the result. I have used Zerkall paper as this is the one that I like. However, I have readied several paper types including some Japanese Ho-Sho paper that I’ve been given to try.
Reading through the tasks for Assignment 2 I see that for task 2 I need to submit 3 prints that differ in some way, different paper, colour, size. With this is mind I prepared a few sheets of paper by inking up a coloured background with a roller. I had already selected a variety of papers, and for size I decided to make various masks so that only part(s) of my A4 lino sheet would be printed.
The second image is the reverse side of the mask used to print the first image, I found that the outline shape made me look around and see the marks in isolation, similarly with the smaller pebbles shape, less meant I could look at more.
The third and forth prints were made on Japanese HoSho paper. I liked this paper, once I’d worked out that I should print on the smooth side. It’s quite an absorbent paper, took the ink well and the image appeared on the reverse side as I burnished. The only downside was that if I applied too much pressure when burnishing then the paper began to rub away, so definatly gentle burnishing.
I inked the lino and looked for interesting areas of marks which I then masked and printed onto the coloured backgrounds I’d prepared earlier.
I prefered the single mask prints in this experiment, especially the left one where two background colours that had been applied quite lightly. The white paper helping to contrast the black ink of the print. Development for a series of wall or floor tiles comes to mind.
In these 3 prints I masked the area for the background colours and then masked again on the area of lino I wanted to print, my registration is a bit out on the final print and while I don’t like the colour of the middle print, the ink is not as solid as the other two, so allows the background colour to permeate in places.
Printing the whole lino sheet: I like printing in red, the images always appear bright and bold, but with this print I have found a problem. My permanent sharpie marker is not as permanent as it claims and marks that I initially made but decided not cut have transfered with the ink, so, for the rest of this exercise I am going to have to revert to darker colours.
For the right hand print the lino has been rolled with a mix of green and blue ink. I really like the way that the ink has dispersed across the print and the additional marks from the ink mix have added extra texture to the pebbles.
I thought at this point I was finished, but looking through my sketchbook I came across a sketch of a pebble stack. Using left over pebbles from my collage I built a leaning stack.
I made a series of masks, inked the lino, carefully placed the masks one at a time, and printed each pebble, re-inking as necessary. I was very pleased with the outcome, the spacing of the mask could have maybe been a bit more uniform and the angle of the small falling stones more to the left. I did show this prints to friends for a bit of critic (not that they’d wish to offend), 2 said ‘nice, pebbles’ and another ‘ooo an African dancing lady, she’s lovely’, which now she’s said it I can see as well.
Review project 6 – I know that I’ve gone slightly off piste with my printing, adding colour to an exercise that stipulates in its title ‘a single colour’, but I’m enjoying experimenting with different colours, and, I am only using a single block to print. The one thing I do need to remember is to reverse my image so that its mirrors my sketches, with this subject it’s not such an issue, but later on it may become important, eg printing known scenes, events etc.
BILLYDOOPRINT1 