— BLOG —

What is Reductive Printmaking?

“Leave the Christmas Lights Up Until February,” reductive linocut on paper, 12” x 9”, 2015

People tend to be very curious about printmaking.  They will see a print or block in my studio and say, “Hey, what is that?!”  Maybe because my studio is primarily one for painting and it lacks any printing press, they are always mystified about how exactly I made these prints.  Did they come out of thin air?  No, of course not.  As visitors point to the print, I pull out the linocut block that I used to make the print.  “See, this is the block that I make the print from.”  I say.  Their quizzical look remains; they still cannot visualize the whole material process required to make a print.

Maybe if my studio were a print studio itself, this kind of exchange would become easier, but I’m not sure.  Printmakers can be show-offs for technique, and they tend to enjoy making work that is complex enough that even a peer will need to ask how it was made.  In this sense, I’m just as bad as the next printmaker:  part of what I enjoy about prints is the thrill that you are working with an unforgiving and idiosyncratic technology that usually only “works” when you are doing most everything right.

I have recently been working with reductive linocuts, a particularly unforgiving type of relief printmaking (the print technique in which ink is rolled onto the raised surface of a block).  Some prefer to call the reductive method the “suicide” method, as in there is no going back if you make a mistake.  These prints involve many layers of colored ink, but only one block of linoleum.  If you have not worked with this method, your response right now is likely, “What?  How?!  Do you ink up different parts of the plate with little brushes all at once?”  Well, no.  I thought it might be enlightening to write an article about a recent print I worked on in some detail.  Hopefully you will learn a little bit about printmaking.  I’ve included many photographs of the work in progress, as I think without them it is hard for someone to really visualize the material process involved.

There are many stages to this reductive print I am covering in this article.  These stages are:

Stage 1:  Creating the Cartoon

Stage 2:  Transferring the Cartoon

Stage 3:  Carving and Printing

Color 1:  Yellow

Color 2:  Light Blue

Color 3:  Red

Color 4:  Violet

Color 5:  Dark Blue

Color 6:  Black

Source photograph for print

Stage 1:  Creating the Cartoon

The image for this piece, “Leave the Christmas Lights Up Until February,” starts with a winter night.  The ground is covered with thick snow that has glazed over with an inch of ice from later sleet.  Christmas lights are still up in a tree, and further away is a streetlight.  The orange of the streetlight makes quite a contrast to the blue of the Christmas lights, and these colors play over the surface of the snow in rich and surprising ways.  I was so captivated by this nighttime landscape that I decided setup my tripod and DSLR and take some photographs.  I had no intention of making a “work” from this image.  I just wanted a photo as proof that this light really once existed, in case I ever tell someone about it and they think I was just making it up.

Gimp cartoon for print

A few weeks later, I had a blank linocut block with no idea of what I wanted to use as a motif.  I had just worked on another linocut with similar low-light/night-time qualities to this Christmas lights photograph, so I decided to use it as the basis for a new piece.  Before beginning the print, I need to simplify the photograph into flat color-shapes.  I like to use Gimp, the open-source Photoshop, as the first step in this simplification.  This is my preparatory image, my cartoon.  It was also tricky; there was a lot of detail with the wintry tree limbs and the combination of cool and warm light sources meant I could not simplify the image to just a gradation of neutral values.   Too many colors and the print will take forever to make.  Too few colors and the richness of the light in the landscape will be lost.  Ultimately, I settled on six colors:  a warm light (pale yellow), a cool light (pale blue), a medium red, a tint of violet/magenta, a deep cold blue, and a cold black.  This is really the bare minimum to get a sense of what the color of the light was doing.

Linocut with pencil drawing

Stage 2:  Transferring the Cartoon

With a print-out of the Gimp image, I then draw a grid on the paper cartoon and another grid on the block of linoleum.  You will notice that the linoleum block is actually larger than the print, and though they have a similar height-width ratio, they are a little off.  Each individual shape is outlined, and the shapes that I want to print black are drawn in with pencil.  I mark these black areas before other colors in part because I want to make sure I do not mix up the black with the other colors, as this will likely be a very noticeable printing error it I do.  Once done with the drawing, I spray fixative on the block to keep the graphite from smearing.

Linocut with Sharpie drawing

Now, I go over the block with different colors of Sharpie marker.  In practice, I guess you would want to mark the blue shapes with a blue marker and the red shapes with a red marker, but I didn’t really have a marker for light blue or magenta, so I just used whatever colors were handy.  You can really color with any color you want, so long as you can keep everything straight in your mind (which is easy to do as I had the cartoon of the image from Gimp).  I will continue to keep the inkjet printout of this cartoon with the linocut as reference in case I was ever confused which shapes are what colors.

We are still a very long way away from getting to the final print.  The whole process of converting the source photograph into a Sharpie drawing on the linoleum takes a significant amount of time, possibly more than it takes me to actually carve the image.  This is mostly because the image is sometimes a confused confetti of small color-shapes.

About to begin printing with the yellow ink

Stage 3:  Carving and Printing

Color 1:  Yellow

At this point, I take the block out of my studio and to a true print studio (for this print, I used the wonderful print studio at Anne Arundel Community College).  As my image has no true white, and I am printing on a sheet of white paper, my first color of ink requires no carving.  That’s right:  I spent all this time drawing on the block and I am doing something as anticlimactic as printing the first color without any carving.  Printmaking teaches patience.  I just ink the block with a large roller of light yellow.  It is usually best to start with light, warm colors for this kind of print, because it is easy to make warm colors cool but difficult to make cool colors warm.  All the inks I’m using are mixtures.  For the light yellow, I had titanium white, diarylide yellow, rose madder, and some 000 grade burnt plate oil to thin the ink out, make it more transparent, and lighter.

Yellow ink printed

Now, when looking at the printed image and the block side-by-side, you may notice something interesting.  Inside the yellow rectangle of the print, there are faint green and orange shapes.  It turns out that my blue and red Sharpie somehow managed to stain my print!  None of the other Sharpie colors did this.  It was unique to just two colors.  So, even before carving the block, I have three (two accidental) colors!  At this point, I am a little worried how this might mess up the print, but am relieved that the blue and red were actually where I intended them to be, anyways.  I have since contacted Sharpie to see if they could explain what is going on here.  So far, they have not been able to get back to me.  For other printmakers, take note of this.  Use what I have learned to avoid these colors from Sharpie!

This kind of printmaking is very leisurely.  One does a little every week, but otherwise works on other projects.  The ink takes around a week to dry, as it is oil-based and I prefer to use no driers (this means the total process for six colors takes about a month and a half).  For the next color, all I need to carve is the area I want to stay yellow.  A carved depression of a fraction of an inch is all that is necessary to prevent the ink roller from touching the block.

Light blue ink printed

Color 2:  Light Blue

The next color is the light blue, a mixture of titanium white and cobalt blue, what becomes my go-to blue pigment for the whole print.  This is a particularly tricky stage in the print.  The ink needs to be sufficiently thick and opaque enough so as to cover over the yellow.  However, if I over-ink the block in my effort to make the color opaque, there is a chance the block will slide over the paper and smear, ruining the print.  In practice, the ink is never completely opaque, and the undertone of the yellow still does come partly through the light blue.  The main thing is that this sets up a warm/cool dichotomy within the light values, so that I can distinguish between light that is related to the warm streetlight and the cool Christmas lights.  The Sharpie stains continue to print, and the red is particularly noticeable.

A word on registration (the way the color-shapes fit together):  I printed this block on a large printing press, but I use no devices to calibrate the print.  That means that I lay the block face-down over the paper and try to lay the block down exactly over the earlier print as close as possible.  If I am off by even a fraction of an inch, it can impact the image.  When this happens, I usually have to abort the print, as the ink cannot be erased and reprinted.  The smaller the marks/shapes in the print, the most glaring the misprint is going to be if the registration is off.

I started the edition with ten sheets of paper, but the final edition will end up being only seven.   My misprint rate for these reductive prints is usually 20-25%.  If you tried to make a reductive print without the insurance policy of printing in extra multiples, you, too, might start referring to this as the “suicide” process.

Red ink printed

Color 3:  Red

A somewhat maroonish red follows the light blue.  It is a mix of diarylide yellow and rose madder.  Upon printing with the red, I finally feel like the Sharpie stains are no longer going to ruin the final print after all.  This is also the stage where I am able to really see the light and space in the print, as the red becomes a dark value to the light blue and yellow.

Violet ink printed

Color 4:  Violet

This tint of warm violet is mixed with white, rose madder, and cobalt blue ink.  It is printed in advance of the final cool colors, blue and black.  As with the tint of blue, the ink needs to be thick enough to cover the red.  This violet is actually slightly lighter than the red, which is good.  I want my final colors to have some transparent luminosity.

Dark blue ink printed

Color 5:  Dark Blue

The dark blue, had it been printed directly over the red, would probably have looked like a black violet, because I printed the dark blue as a semi-transparent ink.  By printing the blue instead over the violet, the blue is not neutralized, but is able to ever so slightly glow a little, in the same way the red and yellow ink do.  This effect of having luminosity in both warm and cool colors in a reductive print is a tricky thing, because if you print only with transparent inks, the later inks will eventually look very muddy and black.  My original digital cartoon had the blue much lighter in value than what I ultimately decided to use.

Black ink printed

Color 6:  Black

The final ink in the print is really a very dark shade of blue, with bone black and cobalt blue.  This color was also a change, as my initial draft had planned to use a dull violet.  I decided to go for a more neutral and tonal composition which let the warm colors become more dominant.

At no point in doing this print did I use any driers.  I like to think that the cobalt blue (which I used in many of my mixtures), probably did accelerate the drying of the ink.  Pigments with iron, cobalt, and manganese often accelerate the oxidization process of oil-based inks and paints.  Still, the final ink color took over a week before it was dry to touch.  Other printmakers have asked me why I did not use the standard cobalt drier and my answer is that I am concerned that adding driers to the inks could result in less flexible films for the ink.  I have a sandwich of six ink films on a paper ground, so there could be some problems if any of those layers of ink were ever to embrittle or delaminate.  I am fine with having to wait a little longer for the ink to completely dry.  I do not exactly have any good conservation literature that supports my fear of driers.  Had there been pressure for me to get the prints off the drying racks faster, I might have used driers.

Looking back at the whole process, I have to say I was relieved that the registration was good enough to keep even the small dots of the Christmas lights intact.  Also, the Sharpie stains ended up becoming very difficult to notice, though not impossible.  The physical surface texture of the print continued to build up and become more irregular with additional prints.  I think that there probably is a point in which this texture might actually make it hard to print the ink evenly in large flat shapes.  I did not get quite to that point at six colors, but I could imagine problems beginning to arise were I to do a reductive linocut and this ink for seven or eight colors.

I hope that this demonstration made it somewhat easier to understand reductive printmaking.  A lot of planning is required even as small changes and refinement occur.  The ability to envision what the final state of the work might look like even at the starting stages is key.

The print in the six ink stages

BRIAN KELLEY ART