Lino Print

I started with my mountain idea but that soon didn't end up looking how I wanted, even in my sketchbook. With the boat I wanted it to look like those cloudy days where you can't see much detail and a lot of objects, like boats on the ocean, look like just a silhouette as I printed it here. The waves and the fish helped to create movement in the piece as well as style. When I first drew it onto the linoleum, I didn't have the fish, and it didn't feel like me, it just felt like a design. By adding the flying fish in the sky it not only aided the viewer in moving around the piece but also added a bit of my own style to it. With the writing around the clouds and within the waves in the red print, I was really inspired by the red sea and the saying "Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor's warning." Although the writing is small, I took snippets from my mind about people who saw the red sky and had a different reaction based on the time of day. I played with the idea that in this print, we don't know whether it is morning or night and so we don't know how to feel.

I started by sketching my ideas with a pencil, then I went over everything with sharpie in my sketchbook so that I could get a sense of what the design would look like when I printed it. This helped me to make choices about what I did and didn't like in order to revise it before I made the final decision to carve. When I carved I outlines many of the shapes with the smallest tool, and got into the spaces between the clouds with that as well, but that I used the medium and big tools to carve out the larger space, making sure to pay attencion to my lines because I knew they would show up when I printed. In the red print I used pen to add some details to the boat as well as scales and eyes to the fish. I used pen because it showed up well against the red ink. I then used whith colored pencil to make the movement lines, I wanted them to be sort of soft looking and not too jarring which is why I used colored pencil over a white pen, and I dotted them so that they wouldn't take away from the patterns in the sky and in the ocean.

I had the idea for the clouds to start with and so I started by drawing the clouds, knowing that was what I wanted to go on my print, but what went below I wasn't sure. I had seen photos of boat prints and they had looked really cool so that was an idea, and also I liked the idea of doing trees. I drew out the trees and the mountains in sharpie to see what it would look like when it was printed, and I didn't like how the mountains looked and I wasn't sure How I was going to make the trees look the way that I wanted, so I decided to go with the boat. Originally I had wanted to do the waves in a similar stripey pattern as the clouds, but I when I drew it out, even in pencil it kind of took away from the emphasis on the sky so I simplified it. I then just drew my design onto the linoleum, I didn't trace or anything, just eyeballed from my sketch. The carving went pretty smoothly and the printing I struggled with the process because of how big the linoleum was. The ink that I applied at first has almost dried by the time I got to the last section causing chatter as you can see in the res print especially. This made it so I had to apply a lot of ink, however in some prints I added too much, and it blurred the lines, especially in the clouds, and got on the lines that were carved as you can see in the black print. On the red one that I ended up extending I struggled a lot to come up with what to add to it, I started but just writing stories about the red sea and saying "red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor's warning." and then I added detail to the boat and fish before finishing up with white movement lines that followed the pattern of the clouds a little bit, to help the viewer see all around the piece.