Once I had cut away/cleaned up my lino blocks to a point at which I felt they’d produce clean prints I began the process of doing my first few multi block prints. I wanted to try them on a few different types of paper, so cut my paper to size and a jig to sink the blocks into to aid proper registration first, before printing.
Having set up my jig and got my papers I began printing. I knew printing the background in black (as the original design had intended) would mean that the lightest red layer (third layer) would be only partially visible so I changed the colours of the design that I would print. I wanted a grey/beige base layer and to keep the blue and cherry red of the 2nd and 3rd layers.
I found creating the colour beige/grey quite tricky as mixing the oil based ink is tricky, I often end up with much more ink on the printing plate than I wanted. Not sure quite how to improve that at the moment.
I think this printed fairly well, it’s not 100% perfect in terms of registration but the little edge of white around the smaller feathers is actually quite a nice little border. There’s some red lines in the top right hand corner that I’d rather weren’t there so I’ll cut some more of that layer away when I re-print. I’m also not sure about the beige, I’d prefer a grey colour.
I like the way this looks printed on the slightly thicker cartridge paper. In theory it should look clearer on the thinner Japanese paper but it’s got a nice level of ink on this print. Maybe it’s using the jig and bit more pressure that’s helped it to print well.
This as you can see it only a two layer print I didn’t complete the third layer as I thought it wouldn’t improve the quality of the print. I don’t think this worked very well. The colour is too pale (of the background layer) against the brown paper. I know I wouldn’t do it like this again!
I’m going to clean up the red layer lino by cutting some more away, and then try printing again with a grey back ground layer before then trying a different colour scheme.
Possible colour scheme’s are: Beige/lime green/yellow, grey/purple/yellow, blue/red/grey.