Water Based Relief Printing with Speedball Inks

This post has been submitted by Jennifer Barrett, a Toronto printmaker. The process images in Jennifer's post are really wonderful!   We have had lots of submissions for relief printing and I urge the readers to look at each one; they are all different and give a wide array of ways to approach this medium.

Background:

I’m an artist who mainly paints these days, but I’ve done a lot of printmaking since I first took a relief class in art school nearly ten years ago. I’ve also worked as a commercial screenprinter for about four years. I’ve mainly concentrated on lino cuts since then, because I find the materials easy to work with and relatively inexpensive. I also like the chunky, flat look that is characteristic of many relief prints. Finally, I decided to try water-based inks because they are non-toxic and therefore desirable for use in a small apartment setting.

I made this water-based lino tutorial for my blog because it was the first time I had tried using these Speedball inks at home and I thought it was a good opportunity to document my work in process. Read my tutorial here