These Events

I recently started the second painting in the series Conventional Wisdom! In case you’re wondering, I wrote a post about it earlier.

This painting is called You’ve Got a Roof, and it’s from something my friend Talia told me: you’ve got a roof over your head and that counts for everything. It’s going to be acrylic on canvas, but I really wanted to use a leaf print as part of it. I thought about buying something quick and inexpensive like scratch board or craft foam and cutting it out, but I thought I’d try carving a lino block.

I haven’t made a carving or a real print since grade seven, but I bought some lino, a cutter and a roller (it’s called a brayer) and I started carving. Here’s what I came up with:

You’re supposed to use print ink, but I thought I’d try printing with acrylic. I rolled the paint out using the brayer on a huge glass mixing palette (a pretty wonderful gift from my last birthday) and then onto the block. 

Here are some of the prints I got:

The top left is beautiful, but the paint wasn’t saturated enough. The next three on the left page were too sticky and the paint didn’t roll too smoothly, so I added some acrylic paint retarder (this clear substance that thins the paint and slows down its drying time). The top right leaf was printed that way, and I think it was the most successful:

For the bottom two on the right, I tried using a paintbrush but it really made the print poorly defined, so I’ll be sticking with the brayer for sure!

The trickiest part now is going to be making prints on canvas. Canvas is super absorbent and it takes a lot of paint to saturate it so it’s going to be hard to make the leaves stand out. I’ll let you know how it goes : ).