I’ve wanted to use lasercutting to help with the more tedious aspects of blockprinting for a long time. I finally had an opportunity to test this with an illustration that had received a lot of positive feedback and sufficient time before the event that I could plan on bringing prints beforehand.
Laser setup
I’m using L.’s laser which she has generously set up in the woodshop. Lightburn for the software. Settings are here:
File preparation
Things I tried:
- rastering the reversed image with a threshold
- combination of raster and vector .svg for the outline (I think this ends up taking too much off of the edge, though maybe if I expanded the selection and re-vectored it would give me the effect I wanted)
Medium
Linoleum is so far producing better prints than plywood, and isn’t much more expensive.
Printing
Struggled a bit with the analog aspects of printing like paper selection, registration, application, paint homogeneity and viscosity, but getting better.
For the final print, I’m trying for multicolor ink on 35 gsm rice paper.
