Aarrrooooooo

I ordered a few sheets of 5x7 Richeson Clear Carve Linoleum because I saw an ad for it and it was interesting on a few different levels. First, it is clear so I figured that was one less step in transferring a drawing. Second, it is clear, how weird! And third, there is a contest. If you use their linoleum, you can enter your piece and win an etching press. So, I took a bunch of photos along the way and I thought I'd do a little review.

Here it is laid over my drawing. You can't use pencil to draw on the surface, but a ball-point pen worked ok. 

I started carving and it is so plasticy feeling. I mean, it IS a sheet of plastic, but it also doesn't feel very good to handle, like carving a wad of saran wrap. I also had a very hard time knowing what I was doing. I couldn't tell the depth of the cuts, or exactly where I was making them. There are strange shadows once you start carving. I struggled for a while, and decided to change the border so that I'd have less carving to do. I imagine there is some way to remove the drawing from the plastic, but I didn't experiment. I just started drawing over everything with a sharpie. It turned into a big mess.

Here it is all carved.

And, in the meantime I stamped a couple sheets of printmaking paper with the stamps I made a couple weeks ago.

Then I printed over the top with dark brown ink. The block actually made a really nice print. All of the ink wanted to transfer to the paper easily. And when I went to clean up, I just wiped the block with a rag and practically all of the ink came away. That was really nice.

Then I painted the dog with watercolor and it's finished! Printing over patterned paper is something I've been wanting to do, but I really didn't know if it would work. I think it turned out well! This print needs the watercolor, but in the future, I will make the ink lines heavier and maybe the print won't need to be painted.