printing with a car, instead of a printing press!!..yes you did read that correctly.

The lake scene linocut was bothering me, for two reasons, The image needed tidying up as I wasn't keen on how the sky looked, but the bigger issue was that I don't have a printing press and burnishing an image of this size just wasn't working out...

I have spent all morning googling making printing presses, they are all too large for the space that I have available and a bit too big of an undertaking when I would only use it once in a blue moon, In the back of my head I had remembered something about printing with a car, there is a good youtube video of this (which I now cannot find!), but using what looks like a woodcut, rather than a lino cut...

nothing ventured, nothing gained, I have a car, I don't have a printing press. So it was time to cobble something together..

I glued the lino block onto a thin piece of ply, but that exhausted the supply of ply, scratching my head, I found an old plastic chopping board, thick and robust.

 To (try and) make sure that the paper didn't shift while it was printing, I made a hinge out of duct-tape (are you thinking McGyver yet?)

 The stack for printing went board+linocut, paper, two blankets to pad it out a little, these were cut from an old woolen blanket, I tried with both one and two layers and it didn't make much difference.

 And then under the front wheel of the car, with the hinge towards the wheel, to miminise movement.

 This was the first attempt, I realised that either I need fatter tyres on the car, or I needed to reposition the stack and go over it a few times.

This is the final print, for this one I ran the car over six times, three times across the width X 2.

If you look really closely at the print, there was a little movement of the image, but I am very happy with this.

The side had a little bit of ink 'missing, so I did a little bit of touching up here and there.

Linocut Cygnus and lough derg

So I wanted to try somethign a little more elaborate and I was out of inspiration for any repeats, so i had a go at a picture, i was inspired by some of the work that I saw online, but wanted to do one of the lake near my house.

The linocut was a slightly different design as it had a swan flying across, but I didn't like it and took it out, just left the constellation cygnus instead. I tried working with block printing medium and oil paints and it just served to remind me that

• I really need a press for working on paper
• I hate using anything that is not water soluable.

So I went back to fabric, and printed up a couple of tee-shirts, all of this work is a first attempt, there are plenty of problems to iron out, and I need to mount the lino cut onto a block of wood as it is bending back on itself, which makes printing a bugger. For the tee-shirts I put the block down face up and tee on top, which made it a bit messy..but for an initial attempt, i am happy with them..

 the next two were initial proofs on paper, but it gives a clearer idea of what is going on..

 sky in this one was tidied up a bit, the fuzzy edges will definitely be cleaned up when I mount the block onto wood.