Lino Printing Workshop

Photo by Nancy Straughan

On Sunday, as per my post here, I went to a Lino Printing workshop by Nancy Straughan at the lovely shop Smug.

This is a picture of me  (mid, centre) and the rest of the class with our prints. It was a real mix of people/abilities, from novices like me, to graphic designers and people who can already screen print.

This is how the room was set out:

Photo by Nancy Straughan

Nancy started off by talking us through the materials; lino, carvers etc. and then we moved on to thinking about ideas for our stamps. I wish I’d thought about it a bit more before, as other people had done (for example, one woman made a stamp of her company logo), but the best I could come up with on the spot was bunting. I thought it would be nice for cards and could be something that would work well as a repeat along the top of notepaper.

I drew out my idea and then transfered it to the lino. We were then allowed to start cutting! You use the curved blade to carve out strips of lino until you have your required shape. I will do a post later going into more detail of this process, it’s a little difficult to explain without pictures and I was too busy learning to properly document what I was doing!

Here are my stamps, and the test prints I did (using an ink pad):

You can see the top left has little  marks between the triangles, where I needed to carve more out.

Photo by Nancy Straughan

I did them as 2 separate stamps so that I could have the ribbon and the bunting in different colours. I then mixed up some acrylic paints and printed a card:

So there you go! A very basic go at lino printing. I think I could have done something a but more intricate, so I wish I’d been a bit more confident. But I’ve ordered some supplies and will get practicing!