I found this plastic as a suggested alternative to linoleum on the Great Art site so thought it wouldn’t hurt to give cutting it a go. I wasn’t sure which side was supposed to be the front of the surface, so I assumed it was the smooth side, as the other side has a small square pattern.
Front of cutting plastic
Back of cutting plastic
Cutting with Stanley Knife
Cutting plastic with Stanley Knife
Printing
print of plastic marked with Stanley knife
You can’t really see from the first photo but the marks cut with the Stanley knife go deep into the plastic (most of them straight through). I wondered if they would cause a problem when it came to applying the ink, but it wasn’t a problem in the end. You can’t really see many of the lines from the cuts in the actual print. But it looks a little like the effect of old folded paper, which is an interesting texture. Could maybe work as a layer with an landscape based print or something more abstract.
Cutting with Lino tools
Cutting Plastic with Lino tools
Printing
Inking
1 of 2
2 of 2
Seeing as this plastic was advertised as an alternative to cutting lino I wanted to try cutting it with the same tools I would use cutting lino. I let myself just cut random lines, make marks by digging into the plastic, and tried making crossed lines using the v-shaped gouge.
Whilst I could have gotten a better quality print in terms of evenness of ink I think that the actual marks worked well. The hatched lines came across really cleanly but don’t look clinical which is great.
Cutting from the back of the plastic
Cut into the back of the plastic with lino tool
I really loved the texture/pattern on the back of the plastic and wanted to print something with it. I chose to do a simple image just to see what kind of effect I would get. You can see the two prints that came as a result below.
Printing
1 of 2
The above print had slightly more movement as I printed and I didn’t quite distribute the ink evenly enough on the surface to begin with so it’s a little blurry looking. Which sort of makes it look like an image from an old computer game where the computer is broken and therefore the picture blurred/broken up.
2 of 2
I managed to print this second print with more accuracy. I really like the pattern and that it’s broken up by the white line of an area cut away with the lino cutting tool. It does remind me of computer graphics, like mine craft or something more simplistic.
Print taken of the ink from the roller having inked the back of the plastic
I wanted to see if I could capture just the texture from the back of the plastic so after printing the image from the block I then rolled the ink roller onto a fresh piece of paper. If you look closely you can see the little squares in the print.
Al the prints in a row!