06 Grace Tan En-Yu

Drawing of design on paper 

Process of carving out lino print 

Finished product!

1st print (To edit: Make lines more defined and deeper on lino cut, add more white space. )

Step 1. Sketch black and white spaces using pencil first. (Mark out the shadows and what is going to be cut)

Step 3. (I also forgot to take photo) Using the reversed portrait, use a ballpoint pen and carbon paper to draw your reversed portrait onto lino print, and outline with permanent marker. Above shows my reversed potrait. 

Step 4. Choose two contrasting colours for your colour scheme. I chose blue and yellow :D Then, use one colour to colour your skin and the other colout to colour the background. Reflections on face or hair should be left white. 

At the bottom, write the procedure for clarity. Printing will be in stages, print yellow, then blue, then black. 

Once you cut the next stage, there is no turning back to the previous colour printing anymore (cut carefully!) 

Step 5. After doing your colour scheme, start on carving out in stages. First carve out the white parts, which are the reflections on the face and hair. Then print in yellow (next step). 

Step 6. Using the colour of the ink you have planned, print your fist print. Print the same thing at least 3 times, preferably 5 times. The picture above shows my first print. 

Step 7. This picture shows my second print. 

Step 8. This picture shows my third print. 

Step 8. This picture shows my fourth print. 

Step 8. This picture shows my fifth print. 

Step 9. Referring to your colour scheme paper, cut the second stage. For me, it is to cut the yellow parts which is the face and the neck. As you can see, I should have made the lines defining the face a bit thicker and more obvious, so as to have a clearer and nicer print. After this step, I will be printing with my second colour. 

Step 10. Using the carved lino print, do a test print using the next colour of ink you have chosen. I have chosen blue as my second colour. My cutting here is quite clean, so I can proceed to the next step. If the cutting was not clean, I would have to edit my lino again, before printing. 

Step 11. Using the lino print coated with blue ink, print it onto the first yellow prints to overlap them. As you can see, the coating of ink was not very even, so the background is a little patchy. I tried again in the next print, to make it less patchy and more even by putting a little bit more ink and paying more attention to the small details. 

Step 12. This is my second print. As you can see, it is even more patchy than the first. It may have been due to how i took the paper out from the lino, or how i spread the ink on the lino. 

Step 13. This is my third print. The background looks better than the first and secon as it is more solid, although there are some parts that can still be improved. 

Step 14. This is my fourth print. Still a little bit patchy. The colours also mix into green in the background. That is because I didn't wipe off the excess yellow paint when printing the first time which I should have. 

Step 15. This is my final print. For my final print, I printed blue over two times. The first time, the background came out to be very patchy again. Therefore I re-coated my lino again and printed the same piece of print onto the lino. This time the colour is solid and clean. 

Step 16. After this, i proceeded to cutting my final lino print. Based on the colour scheme, it is cut"blue" print black. Therefore, i cut the background out, and only left the outline. For my following prints, i will be using black to print over the previous prints. 

Step 17. After cutting my lino for the final time. I used the same piece of lino to test print before printing the actual one, to test out whether my cutting is clean. As you can see, there are some yellow streaks in the background which i would have to carve out. 

Step 18. Yellow was too bright to see the spots i missed out, therefore i used blue as another test print. Based on this test print, i carved out the parts which were not carved out properly. 

Step 19. I proceeded to using black ink to print on my actual piece of paper. I realised that it was very patchy, so I had to print black twice on the same piece of paper. Above shows my first print, although this is not my best as the background is not very nice. It also appears a bit glitchy and misaligned as I may have accidentally moved the print by accident 

Step 20. This is my second print. Similarly, the first print of black was patchy so I had to print a second time on the same piece of paper. The background for this print is also not very good. 

Step 21.This is my third print. This time, it turned out better than the first and second. I am more satisfied with this as the black looks solid, maybe it was because I added more paint and use a bigger roller, so the paint was spread out more evenly. 

Step 22.This is my fourth print. The paint was not spread out very evenly, so the black parts look very patchy. 

Step 23. This is my last print. This is my favourite print. The black parts are printed out clearly and it looks solid.