Lino cut Christmas card

I decided to do a lino cut for my Christmas cards this year. It's been nearly 20 years since I've done any lino cutting, my last taste of it was back in school and I remember it being very hard to carve! I found some soft cut lino online and had my fingers crossed it'd be easier to work with! Thankfully it was!

I had a little scene in mind that I wanted to create, with a blackbird in a hedgerow (some festive foliage mixed in) some snowy hills and something local, I went with the wind turbines on the hills across from our house. So I sketched it out, scanned it in, tweaked it in Photoshop to give me an idea of what it would look like printed (I just inverted it!). Then I scaled it to fit the card blanks I had and printed a copy to transfer to my lino. I traced over the lines in pencil, placed it face down onto the lino and rubbed the back to transfer it.

Then I started carving. I still had my old tools from school, they weren't that sharp but I did have some new tools that I bought for stamp carving that worked really well. It took under an hour to carve out and it wasn't too hard.

I don't have any block printing inks yet so I just used some of my stamp ink pads and they worked pretty well. I tried out a few variations in black, red and a coffee brown on different coloured and textured cardstock.

This was the first batch I printed and they turned out better than I was expecting! Although I think I'll invest in some block printing inks and some new blades for future lino cuts just to make life a bit easier for myself! : ) Better go write the last of the Christmas cards!