In The Forest - marking up 1st lino block

I transferred the ‘In The Forest’ design onto the first lino block this evening. I’ve traced the original drawing and then rubbed that onto the block, then I’ve gone over this with a permanent marker. The combination of the rubbing and thick(ish) tip of the marker means the original sharpness of the drawing has been lost…but very thin lines and fiddly areas have also been removed (or blurred to a mess), so next I shall go over the drawing with a white chinagraph pencil to sharpen things up and fix any confusing areas…hopefully what I then have, will carve well…time will tell :)

In the Forest

Some more work on this lino design today, currently titled “In the Forest”. The next stage will be to transfer this onto the lino block and then start cutting, I’ve left lots of the lines too fine in this drawing, I’ll cut them thicker and then probably do a couple of test prints as I refine them. There’s also a lot of variety of shading in this drawing, particularly the background trees and I did wonder about making those a separate colour to get that depth in the final prints. But I want this to have a very oppressive feeling so I’m going to cut everything you see here as black. The figure, creatures and grass will then have a colour pass, with the background and birch trees remaining white…hope that makes sense ;)

Some work on the next lino design

Have been working on this second lino idea from Wales tonight…while enjoying the Scorpions on Spotify and a couple of glasses of wine...and cider...and scotch…very nearly a perfect evening :) Anyway, it’s starting to come together, still quite a bit to workout on the creatures (wolves/tigers, whatever they are :)) and then a general tidy up will be needed, but all in all good progress :)

A couple of sketches...

Here are the designs for lino/painting. The second one still has a fair bit of drawing to be done, placing trees in the background and working up the figure, but the first one is all sorted from a layout point of view. I’m going to start with this one and do it as a linocut first, so the next stage will be to define some interesting outlines, currently all lines are the same thickness and it just looks like a cartoon. I want to go for something similar to the Golden Key painting with the lines, adding more lines as texture within the figures themselves, these I’ll cut into the colour on the bodies. Haven’t decided how many colours to print in yet, either two or three (one of which will be the black outline) If it’s three I’m going to do the colours on a separate lino block using a ‘Jigsaw’ method. You carve the block and then cut out the areas of different colour, inking the parts separately you reassemble them (like a jigsaw) before printing from them…the theory sounds good, though I can see it getting messy ;)