I’ve only done them twice, both with linoleum (easier to carve), and both were single-panel illustrations. But I have ambitions, I would like to a whole comic book in block-print style (like Eric Drooker of WW3 Magazine in NYC). I think I would like to draw it first, with pen and ink, and then somehow transfer the drawings (in reverse) to the block to serve as ready-made lines for carving. But how could such a transfer be carried out? Thanks to all the artists out there who can advise me on this.
My first guess is “carbon paper”.
After that, you could do something with a two-stage transfer of some sort, I guess. But carbon paper sounds easiest.
Most comics are photographically reproduced, so why bother making a printing plate (i.e. your lino block) if that isn’t the final method of producing the printed pages?
The easiest way to get that look is to use scratchboard. You can do your preliminary drawings in pencil right on the black surface, and just scratch around it. It’s a lot easier to work with scratchboard than linocut or woodcut, the techniques are relatively similar, but require less pressure because you’re not cutting deeply.
Check this out:
http://dianalee.com/beginners_scratchboard.htm
This page shows highly refined scratchboard, but most people like it for doing rougher work that looks more like woodcuts.
If you must transfer a drawing to a block, the most common method is xerox transfer. I couldn’t find a good illustrated explanation on the web, but here’s something fairly good:
http://www.loneprairie.net/image_transfer_techniq.htm
I guess I like the look of a block-cut print, it’s more a question of style than anything else. I would make the photographic reproductions after block-printing the first copy of the page.
I think you may be right about the scratchboard, because doing a comic calls for some finer detail than I could get by gouging a piece of linoleum. The link offers some intriguing possibilities with negative images, too.
If I stick with the lino block, I’ll probably do the carbon paper thing. Or maybe I’ll try both and compare the effect.
Thanks for the tips and links, guys.
Well, ya know, you could just touch up your linocut print, and add the finer detail. But that would be cheating.
heh, I’m already a cheater. My first linocut, an invitation to Mom’s 60th birthday party, didn’t come out so good – must have chopped half the letters in half, you couldn’t tell N from V from I. So I touched things up a little before reproducing the invites. But now I really want to be an authentic, sincere, genuine block-print artist (if such a creature exists, other than Thomas Nast and Eric Drooker, of course).
Everyone cheats. An old girlfriend of mine was a Tamarind grad, she used to work for one of the top print ateliers in LA, printing for people like Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, etc. One of her most tedious duties was touching up lithos with a tiny brush, filling in the little gaps where trapping errors occurred. And these were expensive prints, like $30k Lichtenstein works…
Ah, printmaking, it is wonderful because essentially it is ALL cheating. Any way you can get a mark onto paper, that is just fine.
The retouching of prints after the fact is curiously called “curating” by my printer friends. Most photographers call it spotting and it is almost universal.
Photo reproduction is fine, but the issue is do you want them to -look- like woodcuts or actually print the entire comic as woodcuts. Printing it the authentic way limits the number you can make and would be pretty tedious, but might be kinda cool.
nitpick: Retouching is just a small part of the print curating process. Some print processes cannot be retouched, but are still curated. Curation primarily refers to pulling spoiled prints.
yes, I knew that just didn’t go into depth on it. I just find the term curating amusing considering its common usage versus this idea of “fixing screw-ups”. And the spotting is what’s going to take up most of the time, if a print has such a grievous problem that it can’t be fixed by spotting, you will notice it pretty easily, and it will go in the circular file.
Just nitpicking for the benefit of those who might not know. And time consuming? You should have heard my GF bitch at retouching those Lichtenstein prints. Try retouching tiny gaps around thousands of big benday dots, it used to take me about an hour after she got home from work to get her to chill out. It took months to retouch those prints, and I had to listen to her bitching about it every evening. At that time I was also working in digital photo retouching, spent much of my days spotting scanned images, but she never heard ME bitch about it. I LIKE doing retouching and spotting. But I suppose I would have hated it if I spent all day, every day, retouching the same damn print with the same huge misregistered polkadots over and over.
Make your drawings in pen and ink on tracing paper. Then spray glue the tracing paper right side-up (meaning the drawing is facing away from the linoleum) to the linoleum, and carve through the paper. Spray glue is available at any art store.
That’ll render your image reversed, though. If you want to avoid that, draw on paper in heavy, soft pencil. Lay the tracing paper on that and rub the back, transferring the drawing (in reverse) to the tracing paper, which you can then glue down (you have a chance to ink the drawing then, if you want). After pulling a print, the image will be oriented the same way that you drew it.
Unless you want the grain of the wood to show in the print, use linoleum. It’s easier to carve, and prints solid blacks really well.
That’s how Japanese ukiyo-e prints were produced (well, without the spray glue), and I am always astonished at how they could accurately carve those tiny kanji characters. But you can do woodcuts that show no woodgrain, you just need a really tight grain wood.
But this method is hard to work, it’s hard to cut through the paper on a soft lino block, and it’s hard to get the paper shreds off without damaging the fine details. I would have recommended it but it’s not very practical, especially if you’re just learning how to cut lino. I still think the xerox transfer method is simplest and easiest.
Hell, I could come up with LOTS of standard (but impractical) methods for transferring a work. My favorite is “pouncing.” You use a pin to punch tiny holes in the lines of your drawing, tape it to your block, then rub powdered charcoal across the drawing. The carbon pushes through the holes, leaving a little connect-the-dots picture on the block. I only knew one guy who used pouncing, he was a sign painter, and he had an electric pouncing gun. He put the drawing over a grounded metal plate, and the gun would zap little electric charges to burn tiny holes in the paper. It is immensely impractical unless you have a special need to transfer a pattern to something like a curved wall up 20 feet on the side of a building. I’ve always wanted a pouncing gun, but after many years of searching, I gave up looking.
I have a poster on my wall of a drawing by Leonardo DaVinci, it is a wonderfully detailed drawing of a lily, and the lines are meticulously pounced with hundreds of tiny holes. It is believed that Leonardo pounced this drawing through a second sheet of paper and used that one for transfer, because the original drawing is unsmeared by charcoal used in the transfer. I keep the drawing on my wall as a reminder of the mixture of beauty and tedious work involved in the creation of art…
Wow, this is great! At least four different methods to try! Maybe I’ll make a simple test drawing first, try several different techniques, and then decide what I want to use for my comic.
By the way, what’s the best paper to buy for drawing comics? And what’s the best surface to work on if you don’t have a drawing board? And what about ink brushes? I’ve heard some of the best black-and-white cartoonists, like Larry Gonick, apply their ink with a brush. And can you buy stick-on panels for the cartoons? That’s if you want Doonesbury panels and not Pogo panels.
Sorry about all the questions, guys, but I’m excited now.
Don’t get TOO excited, don’t even think about trying that stupid pouncing idea. I only cited it as an example of the stupid methods people would use back in the 16th century when we didn’t have things like xerox transfer.
There are no perfect methods, no “best” inks or papers or drawing surfaces, use whatever works for you, it is strictly your preference. I know some artists that will only work on handmade paper, I know another artist whose works sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars that prefers to use tea for ink on paper napkins (no I’m not kidding).