What is the reduction method of linocut printing?
Many people will have had a go at the very satisfying process of making a linocut print, either during art classes at school or college, or in an art class. It would most likely have been a single-colour image, carving a design and taking a print which was the finished article, with no further work to do. But if you’ve been bitten by the printmaking bug, you might be wondering how on earth to make a multi-colour print!
Working from light to dark, any areas that will be white need to be carved away first. So I first carved away the plant pot and the central ribs of the leaves, and then applied ink to the block in the print’s next lightest colour, yellow. You can get a rather odd-looking print with this first layer!
Remember that with each colour of the print you need to print your whole run of prints in one go, as once you’ve carved away each layer there’s no going back to take more prints. This monstera was an edition of five prints, so I printed my yellow layer on five pieces of paper, and then left them to dry while I move on to the next stage of the carving.
Then I applied my green ink to the block, and printed my five prints again. While they dried I carved away anything I wanted to stay green. I applied purple ink to the remaining areas of the block, printed this purple layer on my five sheets of paper, and the print was completed.
I hope this has helped to explain the process of reduction linocut printing. You can make a reduction with as little as two colours, or, in theory, as many as you like! My most complex reduction print was probably ‘Chasing the Waves’ (see the bottom of this page). It was pretty challenging but I was over the moon with the result, and really pleased that I’d managed to do it all from one block!
If you’re keen to have a go yourself, why not come along to one of my workshops?
You can watch a video of the process of making the monstera print on my Instagram . If you’d like to be kept up to date on future workshop dates, please fill in the fields below to join my mailing list.