Linocut Printmaking: NEO Eclipse

It’s Thursday. My house is a mess. A friend is flying in on Saturday for the eclipse on Monday. My workload is heavy. There isn’t enough time to accomplish the things I need to accomplish. What’s the remedy for the situation? Add a last minute project to the mix!

The Situation

The month of March was spent moving myself out of a storage unit, which resulted in the main floor of my home serving as a staging ground to determine what I wanted to keep, throw away or donate to charity. Being an obsessive person with a strong sense of nostalgia, the entire process has been especially stressful. Once my workload increased and I faced only a few days before I had a friend coming to stay with me for five days, I felt like I was going to lose my mind trying to get everything taken car of.

Which is why (even now, after it’s all done and I have that warm glow of accomplishment washing over me) I’m clueless as to why this is the moment that inspiration hits me.

But, that’s what happened. On Thursday morning, I’m laying in a bed that I’m trying to convince myself to get out of, when I get this spark and I visualize the entire thing, this idea for a print to commemorate the upcoming total eclipse on Monday. Part of me wants to strangle myself: You don’t have time for this!!! The other part of me is telling me: You can do this and you’ll never have a reason to do it in the future if you let it pass! Screw it, bring the pain.

The Print

Part of the reason I think I can complete this print in a single day, after just having thought of it, is because I have this stack of softcut blocks that I haven’t wanted to use because they’re hard to work with. My process involves transferring a reversed design to a linoleum block using carbon paper. The major problem with softcut is that carbon paper markings refuse to transfer to the medium, making it hard to do anything with real precision. The benefit is that it’s ridiculously easy to cut the block. Compared to cutting linoleum blocks, which requires a careful balance of force and control, cutting softcut is quite literally like a hot knife through butter.

The concept is also perfectly clear in my mind: A bright corona (block one) that’s overlayed by the moon with a border and titles (block two). Throughout the day, while I’m working, this concept is being tossed around inside my head, and I realize I’m actually thinking of a poster by Egon Schiele. It was a promotional poster featuring a self-portrait of him depicted as St. Sebastian, with a border and bold lettering. As I’m writing this, I’m remembering that it was only days ago that I’d sorted through a box from the storage unit and came across a collection of postcards featuring Egon Schiele’s artwork, and that must be why the idea came to me so easily.

Around 7 PM, I sat down at my desk and began sketching-out the idea. A half-hour later, I was working on trying to transfer that idea to the block, which proved to be as difficult as I figured it was going to be. The carbon paper wouldn’t transfer anything, so I had to resort to tracing the lines, over and over and over, almost to the point of cutting through the paper. This would leave a faint impression on the block, which I’d then mark in Sharpie marker for cutting. Shortly after 8 PM, I began cutting, only to find this was problematic as well. While the softcut is easy to cut, I didn’t realize how difficult it makes the precision cuts that the lettering in the design required.

By the time the plate was finished, I was thoroughly frustrated and angry. The idea of a two plated print was thrown out the door in-favor of taking a mixed-media approach. Instead of printing-out the bottom layer depicting the sun’s corona, I would simply do something abstract with markers. This only required me to have a basic idea of where the moon would be printed on the paper and the process of adding this first layer was quick and easy.

The test print only revealed one correction, and, once that was fixed, I jumped right into the printing process, wanting to get it done before it got too late. The softcut plates aren’t rigid, which forced me to lay the paper on the plate, rather than the other way around, and it’s much more difficult to place the paper precisely on an inked plate. About halfway through the series, I realized that, in my haste, I hadn’t been paying attention and the portion of the plate depicting the moon was not transferring completely… which is kind of important to the concept, but it was too late. The situation was fixed for the remainder of the prints, but I wasn’t going back and add more at that point.

After finishing-up the prints, I laid them to dry overnight, cleaned-up and did my best to get some sleep.

Final Impressions

The next day’s impression of the prints I make are always interesting. Like recording a piece of music, by the time you’re done with the process, you’re sick and tired of it and almost hate it. You have to put it away for a little bit and come back for an honest assessment. Upon waking-up, I checked-out the prints and realized they weren’t as bad as I’d thought. It wasn’t the best thing I’d ever come up with, but I felt some pride given how spontaneously they’d come about. The process of correcting the moon with a Sharpie marker worked on some prints but not others, reducing my series of 19 prints to 15, which should be enough given I’m only planning on sending them to people I know in NEO who (hopefully) got to witness the eclipse.