Gannets, Herring and Sore Shoulders...

Last week of the summer holidays!! Seven long weeks almost over! Don't worry, I'm not going to complain at having to go back to work. I'm quite looking forward to getting back. But I have been making the most of this last week...my husband has been at work 9-5 so that's left a lot of time for me to be on my own in my studio.

Firstly, earlier in the week I worked on these gannets...

I wanted to keep this carving really simple. Gannets are beautiful birds, and their greeting with their partners is this lovely dance with their beaks. They can often be seen diving into the sea on the North East coast, so I wanted to create another lino print of a beautiful north sea bird...

This was my messy desk during the printing process. I use Caligo relief ink, it's a lovely ink to use, oil based but washable with just soap and water. In fact, as far as I know the company have won a few awards for the sustainability of their product process. The colour is from pigments rather than dyes, and I think it actually has that lovely old art room smell. Not the sort of quality you usually look for ink a printing ink, but I like it!

So, this is just a photo of the ones that came out well. To the left of this photo is a handful of rubbish prints. As I've said before, I print everything by hand, so getting the ink from the linocut onto the paper isn't always the easiest. I have taken to use the back of a spoon, which transfers the ink a lot better, except printing this lot out has definitely worked my shoulders!! They were aching quite a lot after this, let's just hope I don't end up with huge shoulders and strangely muscly hands!!

So, the ink on these prints take a few days to dry properly, so I decided to start working on the drawing of the shoal of herring I posted the other day.

Even just tracing the original drawing onto tracing paper and then transferring it onto the lino took a good hour or so...

I spent a bit of time looking at it wondering whether to cut out all the white, or to cut out the black lines. Obviously if I cut out the white then the print will come out looking like the drawing, so I decided to have a go at doing that first...even though it will be a lot more fiddly to carve and take a lot longer, I think it will be the better print.
 However, if after this I do decide to do the alternative, I can always just use the original drawing again and transfer the print to a different piece of lino...not sure yet though, I guess it depends on how this one turns out.

So started the carving yesterday afternoon. Going to carve all the outside areas before I move onto the more fiddly fish. Assuming it prints well, I'm not sure how many of these to print out...We shall see I guess.

Right...I guess I've got more to carve...