Creating a sailboat themed linoprint

This video blog will share behind the scenes footage of me carving, inking, and creating a ten layer sailboat themed linoprint, with subtle details in a bright blue sea and a vibrant botanical garden foreground. This video is perfect for beginners to linocut and relief printmaking or those interested in tools that I use, my process for layering up the colour using the reduction print method, and how I carved the printmaking block to create the image.

To create this handmade linoprint I used my trusty Schmincke inks, soft japanese rubber roller, a range of swiss carving tools, and my manual printing press. I started by layering up the blue ink for the sea and sky, and decided on a gradient roll for the sky which involves pre-mixing the colour from white to cyan blue across a palette and only working the roller in one direction. I then carved and pressed some subtle details in the waves in the sea.

Once I had finished with the background I removed it from the block with a craft knife and neatened up the edge with my carving tools. I started work on the foreground with a blank slate of cool yellow, to contrast over the blue of the background and then slowly started to build up layers of greens, carving away each layer from the same printmaking block, and trying to keep my lines loose and impressionistic.

I used a white waterproof pencil to sketch directly onto the block, to guide my carving, and a sharp Pfeil V gouge to chip away at sections in the trees, and grass, to create some depth and shade on the final print. The video blog demonstrates how I created a brown ink mix for the tree trunks and branches, and a deeper green for the final tenth layer of colour, it also shows how much of the original block I carved away over the two weeks that I was working on it.

I hope this has been helpful, thank you for reading and watching my video blog below. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel for future video blog posts and to leave any questions in the comments section, or follow my blog on this website.