Printmaking at GCSE
Art & Design · GCSE · The School
Three processes, three looks
RELIEF — lino or card: what you leave standing takes the ink, so you cut away the light and think in flat shapes. MONOPRINT: ink a surface, draw into it, take one pull — soft, immediate and unrepeatable, which suits a study. SCREEN PRINT: ink pushed through a stencil, flat and even, and built up in layers. Pick the one whose look you want.
Everything reverses
A print is a mirror of the block, so anything with a left and a right swaps and text comes out unreadable. Cut letters backwards. If the composition depends on a figure facing into the page, cut it facing out. Checking this with a mirror before cutting costs a minute; discovering it after cutting costs the block.
Registration in layers
Multi-layer prints only work if each layer lands in the same place. Use a registration jig — a card L-shape you push the paper into — or pencil marks on the bed. Print the palest colour first and the darkest last, because a light ink will not cover a dark one. Let each layer dry, or the second lifts the first.
Cut one lino block and take ten pulls, and use the edition to DEVELOP rather than to duplicate. PULLS 1–2: black on white, to see the block clearly and find where the cutting is too timid. Go back and cut more. PULLS 3–4: the same block on coloured paper — the same image reads completely differently on ochre. PULLS 5–6: a second colour underneath, registered, so the black sits on a printed ground. PULLS 7–8: cut away more of the block and print again — this is a REDUCTION print, and it is one-way: once cut, that state is gone forever, which is why you print the earlier state first. PULLS 9–10: the reduced block over the coloured ground. A sketchbook now shows a process moving, which is AO2 evidence, and none of it would exist from one careful pull.