I’ve been making a lot of stuff over the last year and been terrible at posting it up so I’m trying to fix this!
This particular make came out of a birthday present from my partner. She got me/us a jar filled with dates on folded pieces of paper for my birthday. They’re colour coded so some need booking, others are something we can do at home etc. You pick the kind of date you want and go do it. The third one we pulled was lino printing and in spite of having got all the equipment we needed already we both ended up putting it off for months.
A few weeks ago we bit the bullet, had a go, both loved it and got hooked on it. If anyone’s been thinking about doing lino cutting, bite the bullet! It’s great fun, really accessible and achieves great results really quickly. What really helped us was cutting our lino in to smaller pieces to try smaller things. It makes it even lower stakes and it’s so rewarding.
As we were hooked we started instagramming around and found that there was quite a big community out there of people doing lino prints by carving erasers. We liked the idea and picked up a box of erasers and the book the originator of the whole idea had published – it was around £15. It’s full of fun ideas and techniques to try.
These are super satisfying to do. Really all you need is the carving tool – ours has multiple blades which you screw in – an ink pad and some paper. Sometimes sketching them out first is nice, sometimes I’ve been drawing straight on to the rubber – it turns out you can rub pencil off a rubber with another rubber…
I also really like the effect when you print on greyboard – the texture really adds a scrappiness to the whole thing that I like. Neither of us has any idea where we’re going with this but we both really enjoy the carving. The beauty of it is that you if you do one you don’t like it doesn’t matter all. When we have enough we might do a decent sized print of our favourites, we’ll see.
Now I’ve got the but I can think of loads of printing I’d like to try out!
Has anyone else had a go at this or anything like it? Is anyone interested in doing it?
I don’t know if we still have any of the rubber material to do it but the laser cutter is great for making stamps, though it’s not as hands on as lino cuts.
I made myself a stamp to put on prints back in 2021 but I don’t think I remember quite how to do it now, there was a whole part of job control that would flip and invert it for you. Maybe (probably?) Ruby has that too.
omg, idk how much time it would take for me to get the obvious connection between laser cutter/engraver and a print stamp, muchas gracias.
did you achieve good precision (resolution) ?
Lino cutting is fantastic! I still have the set I was given as a kid and have dipped in and out of it over the years.
It was also why I ended up getting interested in printing generally.
In an ideal world with infinite space it would be so cool to have a press for this stuff…
As much as I’d love one we already have too much stuff in the space available for print making. If I could suggest anything we’d have a Risograph machine though.
Quick safety check, if you’re going to laser cut stamps, make sure that the product you use doesn’t contain PVC. Many modern linoleum-like materials do.
There should be a set of beginner hand tools in the messy room, historically in a small tool/craft/tackle box.
The results on the webstie look really great and it makes a lot of sense if you have a vector drawing to turn that in to a stamp. I’m surprised they developed it with that in mind - has anyone in the space tried to lasercut a stamp?
Now you’re talking! I disappeared down a google-hole after I started dabbling in this lino cutting/printing and discovered Rios prints. I really like the boldness of the style. A lot of what appeals to me with lino cutting is that boldness and some of the scrappiness to it. Zines seem to be having a bit of a moment again and I love the guerilla publication mindset behind them!
Riso needs more upkeep and we’d probably need more oversight on the machine rather than having it be a free-for-all. I’d be up for doing that if we could find a machine for the space and we have the money to support it all. The consumables last a while but are expensive to buy upfront.
Yeah and how many printing technologies do we need in parallel at the same time? It feels to me more like something that might be worth considering if an offer came up for one.
