20 enjie

I outlined the entire portrait using a black marker, and shaded the parts of the face that become shadows. 

Initially, I wanted many shadows cast on the portrait, but later I removed some. Shading using the pencil was definitely tiring. 

The paper is now colored with the respective inks, although the green would be changed to teal. 

To me, one of the fun parts was planning which color I could choose to print, because of the freedom to choose any color. I settled with flesh, teal, and black. 

I transferred the blueprint (paper) to the linoprint, and used a black marker to colour in the black parts again. This shot is my progress in colouring in the black spaces, and while doing this I decided to remove some small little black spaces, because I thought that there was too many shadows to cut. 

Once I finished colouring, I cut the mouth and the white in the eyes. These are the two spaces that I chose to leave as white. 

It took 3 weeks (or 3 art sessions) to get to the second stage of print because many times I encountered problems with the 1st print like the eyes aren't white because the spaces aren't cut deep enough, as well as the lips having small splats of paint by accident. Most art sessions I would feel that there was no progress, but it's all so that the flesh would be spotless. 

I cut out the flesh areas, leaving the shadows and background untouched. Surprisingly, I only needed to do 1 test print, and after I corrected some mistakes, there were no more small blots of ink anywhere. 

I cut out the background, and doing this is more tedious than cutting the skin. I also had to do 3 test prints so that there would be no spots on the background, because I didn't cut deep enough for some of the parts. 

This is one of my test prints, and there are quite alot of spots everywhere in the background, and each time I removed those spots, new ones would randomly appear at different places! It was both funny and annoying at the same time. 

This was the most nerve-wrecking part of the process of lino-printing. Because I only had 2 clean ones, I only had two chances to succeed, and I didn't want both to have random spots of ink on the last try. Both succeeded (a bit). The flesh has many tiny white spots, but I decided to make do with it, because I had limited successful prints. 

The other print wasn't as good as the first, the eyes and the lips are misaligned, and the blue paint still has patches of beige. But the flesh colour didn't have any white spots (a bit of black spots below though)