Classes here in Dublin are pretty fantastic. For many of them you get to go out of field trips and see castles, museums, art galleries, and a lot of cool stuff around the city. However, there’s still a lot of fun to be had in the classroom. In my ‘Cultural Immersion through the Fine Arts’ class we are staying in the academic centre for a few weeks and working on lino cutting; which is a bit of a scary task for me as I’m not a very artistic person. In fact, when I draw stick people they tend to look a bit more like blobs on the paper than anything else. Just to clarify, linocut is a design or form carved in relief on a block of linoleum.
The first thing I had to do was pick out an image to trace onto trace paper, to then retrace onto the lino. I had a lot of trouble trying to decide between images; it took me about three days to narrow my options down to a hamsa design and an all Seeing Eye design. I finally ended up choosing the all Seeing Eye design.
In order to transfer the design onto the lino, I had to put trace paper over the printed out image, and trace the whole thing. Once that was done I had to flip that trace over and put it face down on the lino. I then retraced the image onto the back side of the trace paper: doing this allows for the graphite of the pencil to be transferred onto the lino surface.
Cutting is where everything gets a little confusing. In order to make a successful print the white space of the design must be cut out. This is because the ink is rolled over the lino once the cutting is done – and you need the white space to make the image decipherable. When I was cutting my all seeing eye out I did get pretty confused so my cutting was slow going in order to not mess anything up – but after the first bit of cutting was done it became easier and less confusing. Learning to think backwards just takes a bit of time!
Unfortunately I will not get to ink my linocut and makes prints with it until everyone else in my class is done cutting theirs out. Hopefully everyone else will be done with theirs soon after Spring Break, which is starts this Friday. I’d really like to ink my as soon as possible – this project is a lot more fun than I thought it was going to be at first! For not being a particularly artistic person I’m pretty darn proud of myself.
Until next time 🙂
-Lydia
Champlain Abroad Dublin, Spring 2013
Communications Major, Champlain College, Class of 2014