More lino cutting...

some test prints...

I decided I hated the cross hatching on the iris so chopped it away. But then I abandoned it as it was such an unclear image and I went with the marigold below instead.

I am much happier with this one as it is cleaner and clearer.

There are going to be an awful lot of people receiving  birthday cards with irises or marigolds on though!

I have also found that painting or colouring the iris prints creates some interesting effects and redeems the lino block to some extent.

more using a Cuttlebug as a printing press - lino cutting

I have not done any printing for ages,mainly because I have been doing my MA and the dissertation - which is now finished at last.

This time I have been making lino cuts for an ATCsforall.com swap, Botanical Wonders, where 9 block prints, 5" x 7" have to be sent in.

Some time ago I carved this one and I am inordinately fond of it! I like the positive and negative elements - I think the small fish were cut out paper fish added to the block...

This was a drawing from some time ago I was going to use for an etched acrylic sheet, so I started with this 

but altered it to this, 

to straighten the edge and add more detail to the half carved leaf and to the acorn cups

Next I tried an iris I found in a book of old botanical drawings

and now wish I had maybe stuck to this carving for the flower but I decided it was confusing so 

I did this one and then these

and I am wondering whether to cut out most of the flower away for white space now...

The printing was done using the Cuttlebug machine as a press: only the black one is done with water based printing ink and a roller - as I couldn't remember where I put them, doh. Previously I used stamp pads rubbed over the surface and then printed. Cheap ones are hopeless as they make a bitty print - see second iris. The best are Tim Holtz Distress Ink Pads (second print of brown leaves and green iris) - unlikely but they are really effective and give a nice uniform colour too.

Acetate Dry Point Prints and Lino Prints

 These are the prints I made using the Cuttlebug as a printer.

They have been altered for an ATCsforall.com Chunky Book swap, so these are 4" x 6" pages.

I cut out doors and windows so that they would open and added collaged medieval images inside the houses, before backing them with strong cardboard.

Then I decorated the houses with Derwent Inktense pencils, and added more collage elements to the outside of the buildings. Again these are medieval images cut out from some imagery of old Books of Hours.

Now I have a terrace of nice little houses, all ready to fly off to the USA once I have "chunkied" them up with beads, ribbons etc....!

Using a Cuttlebug as a printing press for Dry Point Printing using acetate sheets and Lino Cutting

After playing with a borrowed machine, I have just bought myself a Cuttlebug which is an embossing and cutting machine, with potential for cutting tags, alphabets and embossing backgrounds... and I am already using it for that.

However, when I first tried it out, it  also occurred to me that it might be possible to use (or maybe that is abuse) the machine as a printing press...

I have been doing a chunky house swap for atcsforall.com, so I had made 6" x 4" drawings of house fronts for that, so I thought that they would make  ideal linear shapes for printing from.


I have to say it took a bit of trial and error!

I used a water soluble black printing ink (Calder colours Ocaldo block printing water colour) rolled it out on a plastic tray with my printing roller and then rolled the black ink over the acetate  plate.  Because it is clear I always scratch the surface with a finger nail before I get started to make sure that the  incised side is facing up.

I had not got any scrim, so after pushing the ink into the plate with a rectangle of cardboard, I scrubbed the ink off using newspaper. It is VERY messy so I used disposable latex gloves. It took several goes to clean the plate and a lot of pressure.

Then I took the gloves off and washed my hands so that I would not be gunging up my new machine!

I had already dampened some coloured card by spraying it with water and then interleaving it between sheets of kitchen roll.

I placed the plate face down on to a sheet of the damp paper.

  Then I carefully sandwiched the plate in lots of newsprint so that
a. there was no stray ink to get on the Cuttlebug
b.there was a certain amount of give when the print went through the roller.

I put it through the machine using the normal configuration recommended for embossing - first plate a,  then plate b, then the sandwich of print, then the other plate b on top and wound it through the machine..


First I made the paper too wet and the print  was watery.

Then I tried again and the prints were too faint (it is sounding like the three bears!).

But I still thought it ought to be possible so  I went back to the acetate plates.

I went over each plate again and cut the lines again with a slightly broader etching needle.

 I also made the printing ink a little more liquid with a squirt of water from a sprayer to make sure that the ink went really well down into the etched lines.

(It's probably not a good idea to change two things at once but I was a dying to see what I got).

And here are my first successful plates.

It also works for lino cutting, though again I had to mess about with different layers of paper filling to get the lino and paper to go through the machine without stressing the machine too much, or without it just rolling through and not printing.

I used a Tim Holtz Distress ink pad which I rubbed over the surface of the lino which was lying in a sandwich of paper - this also printed very well, though  it is easier to take lino prints than the dry point as you can take a print off lino by rubbing the receiving paper on the back with a baren.

However,  I am very pleased with my first experiments -  especially the dry point as it is impossible to take prints from the acetate plates without using some sort of press.

Mmm now for some chine-collee perhaps?