Michael: Turning the wheel again

Having painted nearly one hundred pictures for the Ashdown Forest exhibition, I thought I'd exhausted the possibilities of my drawings and photographs of the forest. But looking at them again, this time with my "printmaking head" on, they look different; freshly inspiring. So I've started to make some linocuts of the forest. Here's the first stage of the first print:




Linocut, 10 x 10cm

Actually, that's the second stage. As usual, I first printed the uncut block in off-white; then cut the block and printed a blend of colours on top of the white. The white first coat provides a sort of primer for the paper; the coloured layer then prints more smoothly and evenly. The white of the ink is slightly different from the white of the paper, so it defines the edge of the image more clearly.

There will be two or three further layers on top of these.