For the sketch, I followed the teacher's sketch of the rabbit since it was the year of the rabbit, however I am a bit unsatisfied with the rabbit's nose as it looks more like a pig's nose.

As I was cutting I need to decide what i will cut out, as I was still thinking about the linoleum and not the final product, the print. Thinking that the carved out sky will be black when I print it, I went to carve out the sky and it was black instead of the moon.

For the final print, my print was used by the teacher for a demonstration on how to do the printing , as such almost the whole process was done by the teacher. 

However, I still got some takeaways:

1. When using the roller on the linoleum, do not apply force, but roll gently. Applying force will cause the ink to fill in the carved out parts, which is supposed to be ink free, so that it will be white when printed.

2. Always have a practice paper underneath the linoleum, as the ink may stain the working space.

3. Outlines need to be thicker, so that they will not be filled in, e.g. if the outline between the rabbit and the moon was cut too shallow, the ink would seep in causing the moon and the rabbit to  "fuse".

I sketched out the portrait and the shaded area or pencil lines are not to be carved. This helps me visualise how the print will look as the shaded part, e.g. My hair will not be carved and will appear black when printed. My mouth looks very weird, because I erased took many times (as seen from the 'white spot' around my mouth) and I could not trace out the mouth of the printed paper anymore and gave myself a random mouth. :{

I did not need to shade that much for this area, as long as I knew where to shade on the reverse (too late though).

Using the light board, I did the tedious task of flipping over and shading the whole area, which as this would eventually be my colour scheme side as well. Using the carbon paper I used a pen to trace the sketch, I needed a pen as it could be pressed hard enough to transfer carbon onto the lino. The reason for transferring a reverse sketch onto the lino was because lino printing would give the reverse of what you sketch, so by reversing twice, you would get one correct side picture :) and not a mirror image of the photograph >:}. There are many different pen ink because I tried to see which transfer best.

I decide my skin and background colour here, later would i know purple is a bit problematic as it involved mixing colours. I wrote down the steps as well for easy reference and as a guide to strictly adhere to.

After transferring the sketch onto the lino, I followed my colour scheme and cut out all the white parts. I needed  to shade all the area that was going to be black as well.

I applied yellow paint on the face area only, where there is skin and printed, as seen on the left, my cuts were nit deep enough and the paint seeped in so I needed to re-cut. 

(Picture shows the lino after I printed so it looks like the paint is not thick enough.)

After cutting deeper, the print came out nicely and the white parts were visible, at this point, the lino paint is not that dry yet, and all the paint are still rather easy to use. The black areas are caused by the carbon the lino to be printed together, leaving the grey areas.

I had 6 good prints of only the yellow skin, thus I move on to cutting the skin away, to print the purple background.

At this point the paint were getting dry, doing purple required me to mix red, blue and white together, many people do not close the paint so they dry up very fast, it was very hard to mix and get purple since it consisted of mixing teo out three paint which wete dry :(. This printmaking stage was also harder and I spent a lot of time, In the end printing 4 test prints and 3 failed attempts (purple). Some areas keep not having paint, I needed to check if they were fully wet with paint before printing which I learnt. Lastly, this atge of painting the whole lino was to see which areas were not deep enough, and I cut the areas accordingly.

I ended up changing my last few prints for background to blue (I still had some good purple prints at least), and as you can see the blue was also too dry here, we could add water to the paint to make it wet. However, if we add water, the paint might be too dilute and not thick enough and not transfer enough pigment over as manually adding water will never get the right amount of moisture in the paint. (So people should stop being irresponsible and cap the paint container when not in use >=O)

After using up all my good skin and background prints, I started cutting the background, I think the knife were also getting blunt as I needed more strength to cut than before. I painted the last areas black as the finishing touch. It was the second last day for doing the prints, and so there other people using the black and helping me get the right black that was not too wet or dry (as they alredy printed).

This was my best attempt at my portrait and the paint was a bit messy through out as I had to balance the lino, printing paper, dirty rough paper all from the wind. Overall, this was a good learning opportunity and let me see how there is such and interesting art form. I think I used the wrong frame as I had not wrote the frame from the start, so there prints are not so aligned, but I think This is rather good as I only had two good background and skin prints left :-).