Carrot trio linoprint

Painting the image directly onto the lino with indian ink

Back to printing again yesterday with a linocut of three carrots. Rather than re-trace the fussy pencil lines of the carrot’s feathery foliage from an original onto the lino via tracing paper, I painted directly onto the surface with a paintbrush. The outline of the carrot’s body, although seen here, is actually cut away, it’s just used as a guide in this context. Also, because the holes or negative spaces within the foliage are many and complex, I left the detail out so that I could directly carve these as I went along. A seperate relief block for the carrot bodies was prepared from foam board for the orange colour plate.

Carrot trio © Peter Gander

As you can see from the final print, a green and yellow were printed first and I was intending to leave it there, but the print lacked a certain something, so I overprinted a water-based black on top of the oil-based orange and green. This imparts a certain transparency to the black as it cannot fully mask the oil colours underneath, thus the green does show through, achieving a dark green. Oil and waterbased printing ink on cartridge paper.