Hi everyone! This week I am back with another linocut carving! This time, instead of carving into the pink rubber squares, we used actual pieces of linoleum, and they are way thinner but easier to carve into. For my design, I wanted to play with the two different ways to carve, either with negative or positive space, and combine it into one. So I decided to do a little duck poking it’s head underwater and I think it came out so cute!

For my process, I drew my design onto tracing paper, then flipped that over onto the linoleum block, and then had to figure out which parts to carve into and which parts to leave on the surface. For the bottom half underwater, I wanted the background to be black because that was what the water would be represented as, so I carved into all of the lines of the duck and the underwater leaves to leave those parts negative. Then for the top half, I carved out the whole background and left the parts of the duck and the leaves standing. Here’s some progress pictures:

When it was time to print, we were going to be using the rolling presses instead of hand printing this one, because we had to make an edition of 5. That means we have to have 5 of the same prints with the same size paper, color ink, etc. To get 5 good prints honestly took a while for me, I had to keep adjusting the pressure a lot and using different presses. But I finally got some good ones, and I was also experimenting with different paper so that was also a factor with the pressure. For my 5 editions, I decided to do it on blue card stock paper to give off that underwater vibe, and I love how it turned out!

Since I am also doing a printmaking “Independent Study” this semester, I will be sharing the projects that I am doing for that as well soon! For this project I basically just did a second version with a way bigger piece of linoleum, and that was a challenge but I love how it came out and will share next week!

Thank you for reading, and if you are in the area, this Friday September 25th I will be the featured artist at Chris Medley’s letterpress shop during Fourth Friday Clarks Summit from 5-8! Come check out more of my work and listen to some live music and visit some other shops!

-Ella 🙂