My new favorite hobby

So this is a long time coming, but I love block printing! I love carving, I love inking, and I love the feeling I get as I pull the paper away from a linoleum block...simple divine! I have been deep in "carving" mode, and I wanted to show off my process from beginning to end. My skills may be amateur, but hey, it works for me. Please note that I'm only doing one run (single color) prints, and I like it that way. To me, the beauty is in the simplicity.

A little background info: the prints in this blog post have been taken from a book written by a great friend of mine named Shaye Boddington (out of New Zealand). The book is called "Beyond the Green." Mostly a blog project, my goal is to hand carve a block for each page of this fantastic story. I'm about eight pages in, and the story goes like this:

A story about Sam. A little bird who loves to explore and go on adventures. One day Same goes on an adventure that would change his life forever. Beyond the Green is a story about how the city is stealing Sam's home.

So ready or not, here we go...

What's great about block printing is how truly affordable it is. I was able to score a kit at Michaels for under $30 which included a brayer, a carving tool with alternating heads, a carving block, and some ink. I wound up placing the provided linoleum block aside and purchasing a pink speedy carve block, which was much easier to cut into (and in my opinion, the soft white carving block that art stores sell is way too soft for my liking).

So I started off with images like this. What's nice about the speedy carve block is that I can iron the image right onto the block for easy carving. All you have to do is get the image printed in black and white using a zerox machine.

After the image is chosen, I simply ironed it onto the block. Once the image is ironed on (using low-medium heat, you simply pull it away to reveal the design and then begin carving.

If you have the patience, carving can reveal some great results. I found that for the most part, I used the smallest carving head and then the largest for the biggest areas that need to be carved away.

And the ink? Water based all the way! Since I'm dealing with paper, water based ink is perfect, and it cleans up easily with water. You can used oil based for other purposes, but that requires solvents to wash up. The ink is pretty affordable (about $6.99 at Michaels). Keep in mind that it does dry rather quickly. To spread the ink, you can use any flat surface. In my case, a piece of glass from a frame is what I use. Eventually I will move onto a flat piece of plastic (much safer).

Overall, block printing ranks at the top of my list!