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There are three lino plates lined up for cutting, all ready except for one small technical hitch: I’ve lost the paper. I brought it in at the start of the winter to stop it getting damp and mouldy, and stashed it somewhere out of the way so the small cat wouldn’t rip it up. Now I can’t remember where, which is exasperating.

It’s a small house, so there aren’t many places it could be, and at this stage I have looked in most of them without success. I could order some more, but since the whole point of making the prints was to use up the paper, that would be dumb. Although that would probably make it magically reappear, the way lost things do when you replace them. In the meantime, I’m a bit stuck. These are to be reduction prints, too, so I wouldn’t be able to cut them and then print them later. Maybe it will turn up. And yes, I checked behind the sofa.

The mid-January slump has hit me hard, and motivation is hard to come by. Although I should be filling my time not at work or asleep with productive and creative things, I am in reality sneaking off to read novels and catch the occasional five o’clock nap.

Painting has to wait for the spring, it’s too cold and damp to sit in my workroom; but there are hundreds of other jobs I could, I should be getting on with. Most of them make me stick out my bottom lip and mutter ‘don’t want to…’, or roll my eyes and ask ‘What’s the POINT?’, like a teenager but with way less collagen.

The work I have done is finishing pieces, printing a small run of a two-plate print with Chine colle (SO fiddly, trying to put glued paper on an inked plate without sticking or smearing); finishing a picture I started in the Spring.

It’s working out what to do next that’s the problem. I need a plan. There are prints to make, because I have lino to use up and it doesn’t keep – but of what? Plenty of printed paper to collage, if I could only feel like it. Canvases to recycle, photographs to sort and edit, plans to make and projects to construct . Nothing so far has dredged up any enthusiasm, without which there is no point to doing any of it.

It’s part of life, with art, to feel constrained or unwilling or just bored; but it’s the hard part. It often comes in the depth of winter, when we’re tired and waking in the dark. I hope that as the light returns, so will a sense of purpose. Until then, I keep going through the motions, as the cold makes my bones ache and reminds me that there is so much to do, and always less time to do it.

In my entire life, I have had one manicure. It’s fine if I never have another one. On my hands, a coat of polish has a life expectancy of about six minutes; and there is no colour that would enhance my appearance as much as, say, a bucket on my head.

It’s not something I think about much, but in the last year I have watched a LOT of crafting videos, almost all top-down views of people’s hands working away at various kinds of printing. Quite a few of them (particularly the card makers) seem to go in for fancy manicures in a big way.

Most of the videos were about gel printing – a way of making monoprints by applying paint or ink to a squashy plate of plastic gel. The nature of this material means that you can transfer the medium onto paper without much pressure, so you don’t need a press. They are versatile and inexpensive, and you can, apparently, even make your own with a couple of packets of gelatin. Yeah, I’m not doing that.

So far I haven’t used the gel press to make a print from start to finish, although it has been useful for collage and Chine colle papers. It feel like I could do a lot more with it, but for now I’m not sure exactly what.

Collographs are something else I have had a go at, trying both relief printing (where the surface is printed from and cut-away parts aren’t seen, like in a linocut) and intaglio (the opposite: ink is pushed into the recesses of the print and the top surface wiped almost clean, like a lithograph or etching). Results have been pretty mixed, and intaglio printing was a total failure until I had oil-based ink – with the water-based ones, by the time I had wiped the top of the plate, the rest of the ink had dried and so no image, or just a few blotches. I like the idea of, being about to use found textures and interesting materials, and I have seen impressively sophisticated prints made with nothing but cardboard and wood glue, but I need to work on the technical approach before I think about making actual prints.

2019 Spotify playlist:

Flickr favourites:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/154767664@N06/favorites

Thanks for your help, everyone… and best of luck for 2020, the year opticians are already sick of hearing jokes about.

Or Andrews, Picasso and me

Although it’s possible to make monotone prints for years, for a whole career – and people do – if I’m anything, I’m a colourist. It wasn’t long before I was trying out ways to add colour to prints.

Most straightforward – duh – is a method known to preschoolers: colouring in. The print (or key) block makes the outlines; then, depending on the paper and ink you’ve used, you can add watercolour, pencils, pastels, markers… you get the idea.

It takes time, and you might feel like you did enough of it when you were six to last a lifetime. It won’t rescue a print that is badly cut or designed. But it is an easy way to add colour accents or highlights where carving another block or stamps would be fiddly and slow; it’s easy to make variations in the prints with different colours, and it does without the tricky business of registration.

So to some extent does reduction printing – a process where you create varied tones or colours on one block by printing, carving away and printing again, so that areas carved remain the colour of the first printing, and everything else is covered by the next layer. This method means – because you are using the same block – that it’s easier to line up one layer of printing with the next (that’s registration, in a nutshell). It does mean that any mistakes you make in the cutting can’t be overprinted to hide them; and that when all the layers are finished, so is the block. This is why it’s also known as a suicide print. It was used a lot by Picasso, although it is unlikely that he or his printer invented it (as is sometimes claimed) as examples from the 30s and 40s have been found.

I’ve done a couple of these, and while this method does make it easier to register, it’s not foolproof, particularly if you are the kind of fool who can absently shove the plate in upside down halfway through the layers.

Spot colour is the next step to full multi-block printing: using chunks of lino cut to the shape of large areas you want coloured and lining them up under or over the key block. Acetate sheets, double-sided tape and a technique called trapping – overlapping overprinted layers to clean up edges – are all useful for this, and I’ve used them for making cards and prints this year.
There are two other methods I haven’t tried yet: chine colle (where thin coloured paper is stuck to areas of the print during the printing process) and full multi-block printing. I’m working on it… in the meantime, over to the experts: http://www.outside-line.uk/printing/