Sea Wolf: April 2020

I have recently started doing a series of linocuts with the theme and title "Creatures of the Sea". Linocuts are a type of printmaking therefore, one makes an edition of prints. As I do not have access to a printing press, my editions are usually around twenty prints for each piece. The main reason for that is after I roll the ink on the lino and place it onto the paper, I have to manually rub the back side of the paper with a Japanese burnisher. More than twenty would get tiring as you have to work fairly fast before my water based ink dries.

For this recent series, I have several colours on each piece. One technique used for many colours is called reduction lino. With this image of a shark as an example, I used the same piece of linoleum for each colour. I first did the background colour of the water as a solid block, without cutting anything. The first and lightest tone of grey, I cut out all surrounding space of the entire 'silhouette' of the shark. Registration of the paper is important to keep everything aligned. Each successive darker tones, I cut away, reducing the positive image before inking it again and printing. The last printing would be the black tips on the fins and tail. The final print has five colours.

Here are some of the other prints in this series.

This piece is technically 'mixed media' as I used spray
paint for the background, the jellyfish is a reduction lino.

For this piece, there were three separate lino blocks, one for each colour.

For this reduction lino, I used a registration device I made from MDF
board, from a design by Laura Boswell, a well known UK print maker.
It was a much better system than my previous registration set ups.

Once more, I used spray paint for the background as I like the gradation effect of the 'water'.

For this seahorse I did two different backgrounds, one on black paper,
the other on spray painted background once again.

My idea was that I would make several different linocuts within the series to sell at art and craft markets this summer. Unfortunately, there will most likely not be any of these markets with the Covid pandemic turning our world upside down. I am currently out of work. The silver lining though is that I have a lot of time for doing more art, including more linocuts. Luckily, I can still order and pick up art supplies at my local art supplies store.

The blue is one lino, the grey of the trees a reduction lino and the black,
a brush tip felt pen.

I'm including other linocuts that I have done over the years, most of them with only one colour, black. I did a series whilst living in Japan, most of them done on postcard stock with various backgrounds. It's always fun mixing it up and trying different things.