Over the past couple of weeks I have been experimenting with lino printing. I dabbled with this at college on my art foundation course (which feels like a lifetime ago) and remember it being quite fun to do.
I’m always taking photos of flowers and plants, so this seemed like a natural place to start. These are a few photos I took during the summer:
I wanted to keep the design simple but interesting. I really like 50’s textile designs and the outline style of the images in ‘The Secret Garden’ book by Johanna Basford.
I started by doodling some simple flowers in my sketchbook before drawing up a design approx 10cm square.
I drew the final design onto tracing paper, then traced this onto the piece of lino (remembering that the finished design would be in reverse). I bought a selection of lino cutters and set to work cutting around the design. Its very easy to slip and cut through a bit of lino that you wanted to keep but thankfully this didn’t happen too often. I also made myself a small wooden cutting frame that mean’t I was guaranteed to keep my hand BEHIND the lino cutter!
Using a black, water-based, block printing ink and rubber rollers this is one of my first prints…
…which I then added a few hand-painted colours to…
As I remembered, this was a lot of fun to do 🙂