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."