I’ve been doing some lino printing lately which I’m finding enjoyable. It provides an interesting contrast to digital printmaking.
The main difference is the scale and speed of it - While I’m working on my giclee prints (usually in illustrator on an apple mac) I tend to go though different colour + shape options very quickly; keeping the versions I feel are worthwhile and moving on to a new slightly different version. At the end I’ll review the options and decide which one most successfully realises my ideas. From there it’s taken to the digital printer itself, where I’ll output the print and tweak the colours until I’m happy with the end result.
Working in lino, conversely, is much slower and you can’t so easily make throwaway decisions. Also, if you make a mistake you either have to abandon the print or somehow adapt and incorporate it.
I made some sketches on the motorway up to Liverpool just after Christmas - colours from the neon signs and lights from the cars against the night sky which I’m looking at using as the basis for some prints using lino, which I imagine will feed back into my Giclée prints eventually.
