The making of my black dog lino print “Blacky”.

In this post I am sharing with you how I created this black dog lino print.

As you might have already noticed – I love dogs and for this print I was inspired by our family dog Blacky. Blacky was a terrier mix who was born in the same year as I.  I lived with her and my grandmother and my aunt for 9 years. She died in 1980 and was buried in my grandparents’ garden. I have fond memories of Blacky. We used to go for long walks with her or swimming in the big lake in Wissel, where my aunt had a small private beach. Blacky was actually the dog of my uncle Franz, but she stayed with my gran’s when he left home to go to university. As I didn’t have any photos of her, I asked him, if he could send me some, so he did. Of course, I will send my uncle a print and I hope he likes it.

This is actually my second attempt at carving this dog. For my first attempt I used an Essdee softcut block and made a few mistakes and didn’t like how it looked.

I had ordered two blue easy carve blocks and wanted to try them out, so I carved it again in one of the blue blocks. It was indeed easier to work with this lino block – you can produce very fine lines on it. I decided to focus on the dog itself and only a little bit of grass. As you can see in the photo of Blacky, it is slightly over exposed, so you don’t see much of the background. I left the detail of her wart under the eye out, because it wouldn’t have worked well as it’s incredibly small. She only had it under one eye anyway.

For this print I opted for the smooth heavyweight Daler Rowney paper, as I didn’t want to cut paper. This paper works very well when you print by hand, which is why it’s now my favourite paper to use. The ink is Caligo Safewash again. It takes longer to dry (a few days) then the cheaper water based ink, but it’s much easier to print with.

For the cutting I mostly used my Pfeil tools and for carving bigger chunks out I used my Japanese carving tools. I soon have to start teaching myself how to hone my tools, as they are getting a bit dull.

I hope you like “Blacky”.  It was a challenge to carve her and I will definitely use the blue easycarve blocks more often – I prefer them to the Essdee blocks.

You can find the black dog lino print edition of 15 prints here.

Thanks for reading

Helen x