Speedball Speedy Carve Block using Process Colours

Speedy Carve Blocks are delicious to cut and a joy to print. We have featured them many times in our blog, but this time we have created a process with a three-layered print.

For a layered print like this, it's helpful to start with a drawing. Map out the colours to plan their placement. When using the three process colours, we will have magenta, cyan, yellow, orange, green and purple available. You could also have brown, where all 3 colours overlap.

Scan the drawing and create a black and white line drawing, or trace it. We have reduced the scale of the drawing on Photoshop and fit three birds in a space to fit our Speedy Carve block. Print the design through a laser printer or photocopier (an inkjet printer won't work for this transfer method but you could use with carbon paper to transfer the design instead).

To transfer the design, place the laser printed design face down on the block. Use an iron for a couple of seconds on the back of the paper. This method only works on synthetic lino and blocks. Be careful not to iron for too long or the block can start to melt! It works very quickly.

Mark out your stamps - C, M and Y for cyan, magenta and yellow (or B, R, Y if you prefer.) Use your original drawing to help you choose the right areas to carve.

The Cyan stamp (blue) - carve away any areas that you want to be yellow, magenta or orange.
The Magenta stamp (red) - carve away any areas that you want to be blue, yellow or green.

The Yellow stamp - carve any areas that you want to be blue, magenta or purple.

This can be a bit confusing so carve slowly! You can also draw this out onto your block if that makes it easier.

When the design is carved, cut the stamps out with a scalpel. It's important that it's easy to see where to place these stamps, so try to keep the general shape of them the same. This one has the same main body and tail shape, so we can place them on top of one another as accurately as possible.

We are printing using the Speedball Block Printing Inks in Process Colours. These are water-based inks so will dry quickly - perfect for multi-layer printing.

Roll out a small amount of each colour and apply it to the block in light layers. Start with blue or magenta, as they will be the strongest colours and therefore more likely to cover up the yellow too much if applied on top.