Linocut: Normal Everyday Pawpaws & Seeing Double

After our experiment at the end of January with linocut prints and pawpaws, we decided to try some more, now with a lot of experience under our belt. Here are the prints--and processes--we've worked on here at the beginning of February.

I started off with a drawing again...

Then I transferred it onto the linoleum and carved it out (this is the plate as it was when I printed the green).

Here's what things looked like after I printed the yellow.

One thing I'm running into is that the ball-point pen that I use to draw on the linoleum tends to transfer to the paper when I print the yellow. But generally I've found that subsequent darker layers cover up the pen.

Getting ready to lay down the green...

Here's the linoleum loaded with green ink with some of the targets in the background.

The yellow and green layers together.

On the same night as I laid down the green, NJ also did some green printing.

Here's her pawpaw design in the foreground. I like it a lot, in its fearful geometry.

At another point during this round, she printed some yellow onto several pieces of paper and then printed brown over the yellow, with a different linoleum block.

Here's the lovely result. The brown here is printed with the same block she used to print the green up above.

Our drying rack, some brown paper bags on top of some low quality Indonesian chests of drawers we bought from the classifieds. (They're low-quality and Indonesian, not low-quality because they're Indonesian. We've got several Indonesian items that are high quality, just not these ones.)

My prints with the yellow and green layers...

And then my prints with the final, brown layer.

A few of the final prints, numbered and titled "Normal Everyday Pawpaws." You can see that even though they came from the same linoleum cuts, they're all a little different in terms of ink saturation.

A few of NJ's final prints, titled "Seeing Double."

An Experiment: Pawpaws and Linocut Prints

For distribution during the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival we had wanted to make linoleum cut prints (linocuts), inspired probably by the style of the posters that NJ bought several years ago, from the 2006 and 2007 Ohio Pawpaw Festival (you can see a poster from that festival here). 

But things got crazy before the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival and we didn't make any linocut prints. We didn't even buy any materials to make prints.

So for Christmas we got print-making materials and in late January we made our first prints. For NJ it was the first time she had tried linocut. For me it was the first time in awhile. 

We bought three colors: yellow, green, and brown. Plus white, our prints could be up to four colors.

We started by sketching out some designs on paper to see how things would look. Here's the sketch I decided to go with for my first print.

And here's the sketch NJ decided to go with for her first print. (See if you can identify the miscalculation here that would, later, result in our biggest learning experience for the first round.)

We added the yellow and then the green layer.

And then we added the brown. Once I started printing the brown layer onto mine, we decided that we liked mine better without the brown layer, so of the ten prints in my run, I only put brown on half.

Here you can see the print on the top with the brown layer added. And below is a version of the print without the brown layer.

And here's NJ's final print. She only did five prints because once she did her first layer with yellow I realized that I had forgotten (from my halcyon days of print-making) that if you've got writing in your linocut, you need to carve the writing backwards in order to make it print forwards.

While we were letting the prints dry, I made a few additions to this painting, which we bought through the KSL classifieds from a woman who was selling paintings from a repo'ed storage unit in Spanish Fork, formerly owned by a man named Martinez, with several pieces of art with origins in Tombstone, Arizona. This painting is a lot of fun, we think, and it reminds me of the title of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Large Bad Picture."

Close-up of one with the brown layer, looking forward to the 4th Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival as you can see from the title.

Close-up of one with only yellow and green, as I was still getting my sea legs on the question of how to line up the layers, so this one is a little more off-set than I had meant for it to be.