Printmaking: lino, mono and relief
Art & Design · Key Stage 3 · The School
Lino cut: cutting away
In LINO CUT, you carve into a sheet of linoleum with a cutting tool, removing the areas you want to stay white. Ink rolled onto the remaining raised surface, then pressed onto paper, prints only where you did NOT cut. The mark it leaves is clean-edged and bold, because it comes from a firm, carved surface.
Monoprint: one print, painted directly
A MONOPRINT is painted or drawn directly onto a flat surface — often a sheet of glass or perspex — and pressed onto paper while the ink or paint is still wet. Because the surface is not cut or fixed, no two monoprints ever come out quite the same, and only one strong print usually comes from each painted surface, which is exactly what the name means.
Relief printing: building up a surface
RELIEF printing means printing from a raised surface, and lino cut is technically one kind of it. Other relief methods build UP a printing surface instead of cutting one down — gluing card, string or found textures onto a base, then inking and pressing that. The mark shows the texture of whatever was actually stuck on.
A print with hard, clean edges and areas that are either fully inked or fully bare almost always came from lino cut — the carving tool leaves no in-between. A print with soft, uneven tone and painterly marks that drift and blend almost always came from monoprint — nothing was cut, so nothing has a hard edge. A print showing the actual texture of string, fabric or torn card, repeated in the ink, came from a built-up relief surface. Given an unfamiliar print, asking "does this edge look CUT, PAINTED, or TEXTURED?" identifies the method before you are told what it is — and knowing the method tells you what the original surface must have looked like, working the process backwards from the finished page.