Here is the Victoria Palace reduction linocut in progress….
First I produce a drawing, and then trace it in order to transfer it to the piece of lino in reverse.
Then I carve the lino – removing anything that will stay white. Here is a picture of the tracing and the lino with the first carved lines in it.
Then I print the first colour. Usually it is the lightest colour. I generally make at least ten prints and peg them up to dry.
With this particular print, I have cleaned ink off the block around the sky because I am planning to overprint later with a transparent blue to (hopefully) create a “night sky” effect. If I leave too much yellow there – I will probably end up with a green sky. We’ll see what happens around the crane. With most of the prints I have allowed the yellow colour to cover part of the sky as I will be using an opaque orange colour next which will cover the yellow completely.
Here is a close-up so that you can see the white sections.