Production on Oooh! Shiny

Ooh, Shiny! is my (Angela’s) linocut story about the triumph of crows to gain access to a wondrous torn garbage bag. Let’s follow through this gallery of pictures. (I used the gallery because I am not sure how else to get the pictures in here.)

1. The printing press. My mom let me use her printing press, which was an absolute life-saver. I did 8 copies of 14 separate pages. I could only get 3 to 4 pages completed in one day so I had to go up for 4 weekends just for printing.

2. Inking setup. I roll the ink on the glass. To the right of that is the papers I am using to print on.

3. The eight pages of the last run.

4. The fresh linocut for the next page. I cut it a month or two before.

5. Rolling out the ink. This can take a while. You don’t want to get too much ink on the linocut. But you also don’t want to get to little. The trick is, as my mom showed me, that you roll it out until it looks like velvet. Once I figured out how to do this better, I could do an extra run of prints each day.

6. Rolling out the ink on the linocut. Those dense areas of solid black are hard to get enough ink on without getting too much ink on the smaller areas like the panel border.

7. The fully inked linocut. Waiting. Though I shouldn’t let it wait to long.

8. The linocut set in the template on the press. I cut (well, my mom did) a template that was the average sized paper (they are all different sizes because they are hand-ripped and the original papers were different sizes). Then that template gets taped to the press board. When the linocut is inked, I put the linocut in the template. The linocut and template are backwards to the paper. So instead of having the extra border on the left for the book, it is on the right.

9. This is a test copy, which you can tell because I don’t have a white cotton glove on my left hand. For the test, I just used newsprint. For the real ones, I used the white glove because my hands were covered in ink and the paper needs to stay clean clean clean. (also, my shirt says “Yarrrrn.” I love it).

10. Rolling the press. I roll it through and then back again. Simple.

11. Finished test print.

12. Covering up the real prints from the last batch with newsprint in preparation to put the next print batch on top. The news print is to keep it all clean.

Much thanks to my mom because she showed me or told me how to do the whole process and let me use her studio for so many weekends where Abe and I ate up all her time. She helped us print many more copies of our comics in preparation for the comic conventions.

When Ooh, Shiny! is ready we will have some videos to post. And before that we should have some photos of the book binding to post. With that one, we will also try to include some great photos of my mom’s beautiful studio I got to use.