Linocut Printmaking: Happy Birthday 2023

This print exemplifies the all too familiar irony when it comes to creative projects in my life: The higher my expectations are for the outcome, the further the final product lands from those expectations… and vice-versa. For example, the print I finished earlier this month (the Happy New Year 2023 card) turned-out much better than I thought it would and the feedback I received was overwhelmingly positive. That confidence was carried into the production of this print, making me feel it was surely going to be even better, but the final prints ended-up horribly flawed.

As always, it was a learning experience and I think that the water-based inks I’ve used in my printmaking projects up to this point will need to be replaced going forward. This is especially true of the fluorescent inks that I used on almost every print in this series. The inks don’t coat the roller or the plates very well, and when the printing press is used the plates tend to shift and smear the final print. The attitude I adopted was a bit too laissez-faire, perhaps, in that I didn’t put enough thought into how the colors of the two plates would work with one another. Overall, I was excited to approach the color combinations randomly, which would create more unique cards, but ultimately applying a top print (with lighter colors) over a bottom print (with darker colors) resulted in a lackluster result because the top print couldn’t mask the bottom print.

Regardless, I do actually love most of the color combinations in the cards. The design (which I lifted from this vendor on Etsy) immediately struck me as something from the 1960s “Flower Power” era, and some of them turned-out perfectly. Again, I think they reliance on the fluorescent inks was a real problem, but I didn’t have any non-primary colored inks and have only had mixed results trying to achieve them by adding white ink to lighten them up. Given the limited resources, I kind of just have to live with the final product, learn from the results and hope the next prints turn-out better.

Anyway, check-out the pictures and the video below for some insights into the process.