Reductive relief printmaking!

I'll be honest, I LOVE printmaking. It's the most fun medium to me, and it's especially thrilling because you really don't know what you're going to get until you're done.

First things first, pick a design. I digitally drew this in photoshop and then printed out a small reference so I could keep track of things. You'll see I made changes. I had it in the wrong size and had to make it larger to fit the requirements of the sizes, but it works. Also, it's kind of rough, but I knew I could make changes as I carved, so I mostly wanted a reference to my idea.

Once you know what you're doing, choose a size, and then print off a black and white version of your design in the same size, and reversed. Using wintergreen oil, wipe down the linoleum, tape the design onto the linoleum (ink-side down) and run through press. This will leave a light imprint on your linoleum and is the guide you'll use to carve.

*For simplicity, you can use a sharpie to draw the design onto the linoleum. Either works, wintergreen is faster.

Next, you'll carve out everything that needs to remain white. Everything else remains intact. It's a good idea to trace out things with sharpie at this point even if you used wintergreen to ensure your design isn't lost after printing. I don't have a picture of this step. (I'm not even sure I did it, honestly.)

Once all the white is carved out, you'll print your first color. My first color was blue.

A good rule of thumb is to print lightest to darkest, as it's easier to cover blue than black. Here's a picture of my linoleum covered in blue ink. This was the scary part because at this point if something got missed, too late. (I missed two suction spots on the middle tentacle.)

There's just the blue printed. As you can see, it looks a little empty, but this is exciting because then you get to add more to it!

Wipe off excess ink off linoleum with vegetable oil and clean off oil with windex. Harsher chemicals will remove sharpie and that would be a disaster. Carve out everything that is just the color that was printed first, leaving everything else. 

As you can see, I've left the dark blue waves, the octopus tentacles, the submarine, diver, and just cut out the blue. Because the colors I picked were all separate, it worked that when this was carved, I didn't have to carve anything else, I was able to just use small brayers to only ink up the sections I planned to print. 

I did the darker blue, black, and yellow at the same time to minimize problems with getting the registration right.

Once those colors were on, I cut out the bottom half of the diver and the yellow bits of submarine. In retrospect, I should have left the diver. It would have allowed me to do a black and white monoprint, had I so desired, but oh well! destroying it is half the fun.

Next, I printed purple and the grey elements of the submarine, effectively finishing the piece.

Depending on the location of colors, it may require much more carving, but there's a basic intro into how to do a reductive relief print! 

Some helpful tips:

Registration is EVERYTHING on a relief print. Create a jig to fit the linocut in with cardboard before printing. We marked a line across the top, put down packing tape, and used masking tape to take the printing paper to to make sure it was in the right spot. By having a line that the paper being printed on MUST line up with instead of just a mark, it's easier to get it right. There also needs to be a spot marked on the jig of where the edge of the paper needs to hit so it's registered both at the top and side so everything lines up. It can look cool if the registration isn't perfect, but just getting it right the first time is easier than starting over!

Use more papers than  you think you'll need to print on. We had to create five prints, but I think I did eight in the event something wasn't lined up correctly or whatever. It's easier to plan for extras than be disappointed that you don't have enough completed pieces.

Print with a partner so there's always someone with clean hands. Nothing is worse than printing something and getting an ink fingerprint on the clean white edges!