The Making of "Solitude" Part 2
The ink from the first colour is now dry. The next colour I want to add to the print is a grey. Not too dark, not too light, but enough to give a clear distinction with the blue. First however, I have to carve the plate.
Basically, everything I want to remain blue in the final print can be carved away now. The sky was removed but you'll notice that I left a strip of lino at the top of the plate. I did this in order to maintain the integrity of the lino plate in the guides on the registration board. When carving lino right to the edge of a plate, there's always a danger of it breaking up and weakening, which could cause problems later on with registration. All you have to do is to make sure the inked roller stays away from that strip!
To make sure the roller didn't touch the strip, you can see that I did completely remove lino right to the very edge just above the fell and the trees. There was sufficient strip remaining not to affect the integrity of the plate edge on the registration board.
This is the part where you find out just how well you made the registration board!
There is one other point I should make here. You also need to ensure that your paper is the right way round when you make each successive print. You can mark the back of each print with a little cross or something to show you which way round it should be if you feel it will help. Mark each print in the top left hand corner as you do the first colour print and mark a corresponding cross on the strips on the registration board, that way you're guaranteed to get it right.
If you remember in Part 1, I mentioned about variations in print quality between each print. You can see a good example of this above. That's not to say either of these prints have come out bad, indeed I think they're both fine and the mottling creates an interesting effect.
I am delighted with the registration. The time spent preparing my board at the start has really paid off. However, I was a bit careless in allowing some grey print to touch the blue sky. That was down to sloppy rollering where I allowed ink to touch a part of the plate that shouldn't be printed. Sadly, there's nothing I can do about that now and I will have to hope that it doesn't spoil the finished print where it occurs.
So, now to let this dry before carving the plate once more and printing with the final colour, black.
Marty Strutt January 2019