I’ve recently been asked by a friend to teach him how to do a linocut. That got me thinking… ‘I really ought to review how to do a linocut’! The last time I did one was a school humpty-hump years ago. Things have moved on a little since then – the tools are the same, but there are various different hardnesses of lino and even a lino replacement. I chose to use Speedball’s Speedy Carve block, a (4×6″) piece of pink rubber which is softer to carve than lino. I designed the cut in Illustrator and then transferred a laser copy to the rubber by ironing it on face down. Top tip – wait until block is cool before peeling off for a better transfer.

The block is easy to carve but is so soft as to bend in front of a blunt linocut blade rather than cut through. This makes fine detail hard (impossible) to achieve. It’s also so flexible as to distort if any pressure is put on it during printing, shifting under a roller and smudging the print. That said, it doesn’t need as much pressure to transfer the ink as I suspect lino would – it’s like a comparison between a rubber stamp and a carved woodblock.

I used Caligo Safe Wash Relief Ink to print the cards after several proof prints and more carving to remove stray high bits where they should have been low. I’ve printed off fifteen 5×7″ cards ready for packing in 5s to sell at the Craft Market next month (2nd November, Countesthorpe Leysland Community College, 10-4).

There’s a meme on Facebook going around which points out what people should expect to pay for when buying handmade goods. There’s not just the materials and time for the item itself, but for the time taken to design, make, proof, print and for, in this case, the misprints. Here are the rejects:

All of them had wayward ink marks (hastily carved away after each duff print). At first, these were dumped in the recycling bin, but then I decided to reuse the cardstock at some point by covering over the print with backgrounds to other designs. Waste not, want not. And it leaves negligible waste to include in my pricing. With other handmade cards on sale at previous shows for £1 each, I think it’s going to be hard to sell a pack of five for a tenner but I can always hope there are some customers who recognise the work involved and are prepared to pay the price.