I thought about what size to do the print. If anyone buys it, I would like them to be able to frame it at home with a shop bought frame. So I needed to leave enough of a border so that it could go into an A3 frame without a mount, but not too much so that there is a lot of white space if they choose an A2 frame with an A3 mount. I decided to leave a 2cm border on the top and sides, and 4cm at the bottom.

I decided at the outset that I would not aim for perfection, that there are bound to be mistakes and that it should just be good enough.

It started off well. I made 12 prints

When I came to print the next layer of dark grey the registration of the print went awry. I went from feeling quite happy about the process to feeling despondent and frustrated. I made a few adjustments but it still didn’t work. So I stopped myself from ploughing on in the vain hope that doing the same thing again and again would somehow miraculously give a different result.

After some time away, it became obvious that the lino block, which had been washed and left to dry, was not sitting totally flat, which may have been the cause of the issue. So, I warmed it up and put it under a pile of heavy books whilst it cooled down. I came back to it a while later and tried making another print, which worked much better. Feeling a bit happier about things I went on and finished the rest of the prints. I must have inadvertently caught some of the cut out areas whilst inking up which caused some chatter on the base red layer (I clearly hadn’t taken on board the lessons from the first session) and on a couple of prints there was too much give in the blanket allowing the paper to be pushed down onto the cut out areas which caused marks on the red ink. This was resolved by adding in some folded newsprint which created some rigidity over those areas.

I liked the slightly mottled effect of the grey on the figures – it gave the sense of light falling on the figures or a lack of solidity. I wanted the head silhouette to be stronger so I burnished the head and the front side of the figure with a spoon to get a darker print. I liked the prints at this stage, but I felt that the two grey figures didn’t have enough definition between them, so I went on with the final gold layer.

My total of usable prints had reduced to 8.