Last Thursday I did some test prints of each individual lino block, to see how they looked printed and to see if I felt there was any more cutting away that needed to be done.
This test has a second layer on it which is badly registered as I forgot that it was a test print and I hadn’t created it in a jig. So when I came to print the second layer using a jig of course it was mismatched – a silly mistake! But back to my point the grey back ground layer was originally a test print which I was happy with the quality of – in terms of how the image/lines I’d cut away printed. So I didn’t feel the need to make any changes to the lino before using it to print again.
This layer as you can see has a lot of little lines where there’s little pieces of lino picking up ink. I wanted it to be a cleaner image so set about cutting away most of the little lines so only the central deliberate shapes remained.
This layer was the layer that took the longest originally to prepare as I had to cut so much away. Again there’s still a lot of extra lines on the test print. So I set about cutting most of these away for a cleaner print.