Here are more dog pictures (drawings done in the time it takes for a spaniel to get bored), drawn in hard charcoal, some coloured in after, using conte crayon over a dampened surface.
There is not much detail on this one (above) – as a guide I am on a path looking at a footbridge over a stream, which is behind the trees.
My son has created a new character, a Goblin Barbarian. I drew this on the Ipad while watching Flight Attendant on the telly. Apparently it doesn’t match what he has in mind though.
This is a linocut version developed from the dog sketch below.
This version, I printed the foreground tree first in brown before overprinting in black.
This is the press I built this weekend. This 12mm plywood base is blued onto a support to lift it from the table. Two long nails, with their head sawn off and a paper frame act as guides.
Plastic packaging that coincidently arrived with a new barbecue (because, guess what, we can see family again, but only in the garden) works well as a blanket to apply even pressure. You can see ink through this only because I am printing on the reverse side of an earlier failed experiment.
The pressure is applied to the top plank using two slats of wood from an old bed frame. These are pre-tensioned and bowed slightly to take weight. Here the convex side is downwards so pressure at the ends will also transmit to the middle.
Pressure is applied through 4 small G clamps.
The first attempts were disappointing. This was solved by using the plastic blanket and switching the bowed slats to run longitudinally rather than across the upper plank. The effect was dramatic, with the printing paper recessed all round the lino block with, but not without, the blanket.
The next two versions are shown (made to guide further cutting of the block). The one directly below used brown ink contaminated with black from the first attempt. There are cuts in the tree that have failed to print as white gaps, but create a more interesting texture, somehow selectively attracting the black contaminant. This is worth exploring further.
kestrelart 