Watercolor backgrounds

Tonight was a super-productive evening in the print studio. When I arrived for class, all ready for the collograph lesson, I was taken back to the days of college, with a handwritten note taped to the door: "George had an emergency. You're welcome to stay and work." So I did.

None of my classmates showed up tonight, so perhaps it was best that George wasn't there. I was kind of stoked to have some free time in the studio, and I set to work printing up some of the things I've been working on this week at home.

I mentioned watercolor in my last post, and that was the name of the game for the first few prints. I've had a couple of linocuts going, and I prepared some watercolor backgrounds for them before I went in today:

I wasn't sure if the white block printing ink was going to be bright enough to show up on these backgrounds, but I decided to give it a go. I had prepped the blue/brown backgrounds for St. Joe, and rolled him up first. The result?

Awesomeness.

( By the by, I decided to add St. Joe's name at the bottom. I think it was a good choice.)

I also rolled up a plain old black copy of this same linocut, which also turned out well. As soon as it's dry and I can scan it, I'll have it up in the cafepress shop (ahem....Mom).

I've also been working on a quirky little scene of my own. This is the first linocut I've worked on that has come entirely from my head, instead of being worked from a pattern or picture. Here's the linoleum all inked up:

I printed her on a watercolor background, which was slightly less successful than with St. Joe, but not bad:

And I gave her a straightforward printing, too.

 

I still need to get a really fabulous black and white print, but it's a good start.

Lessons learned:

1. I still need to work on the right method for rolling up a set of lino prints. The ink gets dry and sticky fast, and I'm not sure exactly how to handle it. I think that oil-based would be better to work with, but will also deteriorate my linocut faster, which I'm not interest in at this point in my printing education.

2. I LOVE the watercolor background, but I need to either go really dark and print in white, or really light and print in black. These are easy changes to make.

(All of the images in this post are just pictures, not scanned versions of the artwork. Once they dry, I'll try to post some of the final products, which will be a bit clearer!)