Carving begins!
I finally started the carving process. In fact, it goes pretty quickly with the fairly simple designs I have so far. And they’re all small, approximately 4″x6″.
I bought 3 different materials to carve, all made by Speedball: 1) the traditional lino block (linoleum mounted to a wooden block); 2) Speedy Cut block (off white, rubber/eraser-like substance); and 3) Speedy Carve block (pink rubber/eraser-like material). The Speedy Cut is a slightly smaller block – 4″x5.5″ which required some modification to the design so it would fit. There’s one more, similar product, made by Utrecht that I haven’t tried yet. In fact, it was a Utrecht article I read that turned me on to try block printing, in the first place. They seem to carry a variety of sizes that are mounted and unmounted. More research left to do!
Carving the rubber/eraser-like blocks was the easiest for me. However, it’s easy to gouge out sections of the rubber and cut way deeper than you need. I’m not sure how that will affect the printing. Carving the lino block was harder for me to control the cuts. Perhaps that’s because I had forgotten the TIP: heat up the lino block with an iron before starting to carve. Since I hadn’t done that, the blade would occasionally skip away from me and nick an edge or two (and my finger once). However, once I had the design roughly cut out, I had a much easier time carving down further.
At this point, I have carved a design into each of the materials. I probably like the pink stuff the most. I also noticed that the white, Speedy Cut block seemed to flake as I worked with it. Almost felt like pieces were disintegrating, to a degree. I don’t know that this material will last as long as the other two once I start printing.
