In my last post, mk asked if I had tried multicolor linoprinting.

I said "Well actually..."

That night I was working my first cuts on this repeating pumpkin pattern. Tonight I'm looking at the three carvings together and trying to get a better alignment.

I realized not every #showhubski had to be like 5 pages and thorough as fuck and realized my last post was just as good, too, and a lot easier to make without having necessary less value. So here's another casual thread with a big picture dump at the end if you want to see pictures of this carving in progress.

Here's my first attempt at both an invisibly repeating, AND multi-color linocut/stamping pattern.

Yup, I went for "complicated".

Here's just the base stamp (the only portion that is actually on lino btw) in black. It's repeating pretty well, and besides, with a lino there's only so much correction that can be done by the time you get to the point of "I can stamp it and see the pattern." By that point if you have overcut or something is not aligned, it's just not aligned and you can't fix it.

I've been using my ruler a lot! :)

Tonight I decided to compare each layer side by side with the base to see if I could see anything wrong.

I DID draw this pattern out first and then trace 3 copies to try to get as exact as possible. It's what you're supposed to do. Still, hey look at those corners. It may not be easy to tell from the photo, but it looks like I accidentally migrated a corner of color. It should be in the bottom right corner of the green stamp -- but instead you can see I left that little piece in the upper right hand corner.

It means I won't have color there when I planned on it, but I can also remove the color from that color where it doesn't belong, and that'll help clean up the next print when I try it.

I also have to clear out all this blank space in the middle (that's why there's green lines in the practice tri color print) -- which is boring AF.

So this way I got to at least see/learn something interesting to fix!

Photodump

This photo was staged for this post which you can tell because the green stamp is not correctly aligned. The little pumpkin should be in the lower right.

My draft sketch.

My actual first multi-color linocut attempt. Technically the pumpkins are my second. This was an extremely basic 2nd layer however. I barely cut it, I believe I actually had a scrap that was almost the right size to make the foundation of the shape for the yellow bit.

Come back in a day or so because I should be able to post my second pass at getting a good print of this thing in the comments!