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.

Test Prints – Layer 1

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.

Test Prints – Layer 2

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.

Test Prints – Layer 3

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.