Block Printing: Design & Create Your First Print!

1. Introduction: Hey, what's up everybody and welcome to Block Printing, design and create your first print. In this class, I'm going to show you everything from taking your original sketch to transferring it to linoleum, curving that linoleum and finally creating your final print. In this class, I want you to pick your favorite quote and choose whether or not to add an illustration to go along with it. In my case, I did decide to do that. I picked, 'Fortune favors the brave' and I decided to do a little bit of a creepy fortune teller to go along with that. I got some skulls, some magic books and potions and things like that just adds some interests to the overall print. I've been doing block printing for a couple of years now and I've picked up some tips and tricks along the way that I think I can teach you guys to help make the process a little bit easier for you. I Just finished not too long ago this lumberjack print right here, which I'm also pretty proud of. I hope that you guys can learn something from the class, post your projects. I'm really excited to see what you guys come up with and hopefully you have a lot of fun and find this class as addicting as I do when it comes to Block Printing. Thanks very much. I will see you soon. 2. References: Welcome back. We're just going to quickly show the research phase. Usually we just pull up the good old-fashioned Google. If you have some books, feel free to go through those. Those are really useful. You might find some good inspiration there. I've decided that mine's going to be a fortune teller. I'm just simply going to type in, fortune teller. You just go over to Google Images. Now, keep in mind, this is really important. None of these images are free to use. They all have special owners that took the photos or did the illustrations, in no way are you going to copy anything you ever see on Google Images. Basically never copy anything ever. But you're going to find some rough things, you might like the turban this girl is wearing. You might like her hand placement or the way her elbows point out. Things like that. What I would do is I would drag these things that I find, over to my desktop. Again, this is Shutterstock. You can actually license this image and so on and so forth. But find things. Or maybe you like the way this girl's makeup is. You're going to take that over. Fine, you have it. Different things. You want to just decide what you want. Maybe you don't like any of these crystal balls, maybe you like this illustration. Type in, crystal ball. Find a good crystal ball or whatever, maybe you like this base. This is what I did, simple enough, just start searching things that you think you might want to need. Lookup, I had some wine bottle and stuff like that. Look up a wine bottle. Basically what I'll do is I'll drag it over all to my desktop, and then eventually I'll just make a folder which I've called Fortune Teller, and here's some of the images that I found. I thought that this turban was cool. I really like the idea of a feather in here I thought originally I was, "Maybe I'll do an animal or something like that." But that changed. This picture came from here originally. This is by Rafi Alan model. She came up while looking for fortune tellers. Of course she's sexy and she's in the Victoria's Secret gear and all that stuff. But I liked her face, I liked the eyes that she has and things like that. But I found that because she's off center, I want mine really symmetrical. I use this to base shoulder heights and where the breasts are going to be in comparison to the navel and the face and all that stuff. Here, I thought that this is an interesting the way that the turban came up in this angle. I thought maybe a space would be interesting, maybe the hair and so on and so forth. You just go along and just see what might be interesting here. These are all the different photos that I found. Again, this one was to have to do with the shape and where the elbows landed. At first, I had them drawn really tight to the body, but I found that's really unnatural if the hands are moving forward towards the center. But again, you learn that thing as you go. Just more and more illustrations and more styles. Again, that's not my sketch, I have my own files in here too. These are all owned by the original photographers, original illustrators. You don't want to be copying anything, but there's no reason why you can't use it for inspiration. Once I had all that laid out, I had decided I want to do a fortune teller. I did mine a little backwards. From there, I decided maybe I should have some sane in there. I just Googled fortune quotes and I found some of these quotes here. I just took a little screen captures of them and I put them in this folder to just to see what I want to work with. Some of them I thought were interesting. Of course, I landed on this one, "Fortune favors the brave." I just thought it was simple. I'm not a huge inspirational quote person myself. Very few do I read, and I feel real motivated or enlightened by them. But I just thought it was something simple and bold and would work really well with the illustration that I was doing. Again, real quickly, I thought that the girl's hair was really nice, so and I thought maybe I was going to expose a lot more of the hair at the top. Just things like that. You see how the artists tackle things that you get inspiration from there. From all that, that's when I go into my original sketch ideas, which I'll show you more in the next class. But this is my original sketch, which is really sloppy, but it's based on those reference images. Go ahead and get out there, use Google, use is book. Use anything you want, Instagram, social media, and just trying to find inspiration for the things that you want to draw, and maybe you're not the greatest artists that you can't just draw from your mind. That's how I'm. I haven't drawn only in the last few years. I picked drawing back up. I hadn't drawn much since I was a kid. I'm really a bit behind. I wish I could get better. I'm trying every day. But for now I need those references and I need to build a little library basically in my head. Yeah, we're going to show you the next phase, which is how I take this original sketch, go over it a few times, refine it, and then try and get it to where my final print will be ready. 3. Creating Your Sketch: We're going to show you guys how to go through the sketch phase. This is how I do it. Some of you are going to be better than I am, you're going to have more experience. You can actually skip some of these steps because I like to take it into the computer. I don't always do it. I didn't do it on a lumberjack print, which you can see my Etsy store. But for some of them, and especially this one, I like to play around with elements and I have to do with being a graphic designer, when I'm making logos, I like to just shift things around a little, which I find for illustration as well. I might feel that this text is just too cramped to here and so on and so forth. But anyway, this is my original sketch, it's really loose, it's not very good, you can see the girl's face is just totally bad, but I like to experiment with things, and just got to get the rough layout of what's in my mind. From there, I actually will take it again and in this case, I brought it in the computer and I just started sketching. I've got a tablet and, I'll just start getting in here and I'll draw the lines based on this thing. I'll get in here and I'll experiment, I may want some serifs in here, to do some thicks and thins, might put a line in there, that's some sloppiness, but you get the idea. Let's Control Z, command Z, I mean. Then I'll experiment with some things, I'll try and add in some curtains in there, I add some stuff, you can see I just have these bottles here. I was initially put some fortune teller cards, and I decided that maybe a skull would be cool, a potion bottle, especially here, and then I looked up different fortune teller cards to see what the meanings were, and there is sun, which if I remember is light, and a lion and it had this, you saw the infinity symbol law. The snake was just an idea, and then I just experimented. The sun's always had faces, but when I had the face in there I found that it was really distracting. It's pulling your eye away from the text, it's pulling your eye away from the face of the girl and it's bringing it down into here too much. I just found my eye always here. That's not really what I want. I want to be able to have the person's eye moving around the illustration. I like to have a lot of symmetry. It's not flawless, but you basically have such similar layouts on both sides. It's a little difficult to balance texts when you have three characters here, but you have five characters over here. That becomes a lot of playing around. Yeah, this sketch, I would print it out. I would print it out on a light blue or something and I'll go over it again with pencil, experiment on some new things, this, I had the hair just mirrored, but I wanted to get in there and maybe change that up and allowing them to look exactly the same on either side. It looks like I mirrored it, and I want it to look hand-drawn and imperfect. That's the beauty of block printing. It doesn't need to be perfect, you want to show that it was built by human and not necessarily a computer. Even though in this case, I'd like to bring a computer involved. Here's my new sketch, I went over some things, I added some shadows. I tried adding some shadows in around the eyes and stuff like that, but it made it look scary. I didn't really want her to look scary in this case, it's not a bad idea, but for what I wanted to do, I wasn't feeling it. I got the hair to wind around the back and come over here. I don't have that symmetry, but then I decided to balance and I may add a tattoo. Playing with this rose tattoo idea, I thought maybe I'll put some text in here and show you what I'm going to do with the book yet. Definitely not happy with the type yet. I'd like it to be sloppy, but that's a little too sloppy that lines all over the place. This text is just not really there. At that point, I would take it into my computer again. I scanned it, brought it back in and I started drawing it again. Now here we go. This has actually a mix of vector elements in my drawing, so you can see that most of this is the drawing just scanned, and this stuff here, I've actually used some fonts and I've played around with that thing. Again, if you're not comfortable with hand lettering, you can bring some fonts in. I'm somewhat comfortable with it, but in this case, I found a font that I thought was pretty cool, and then I did trace over and try and change some things up just to add to the flavor of the overall design. Here, you get, I'm experimenting with leaves, I'm experimenting the face, how the tattoo of the rose is going to show, whether I want some rings and some bracelets and this is going to say magic, but maybe I don't want that, it's just not clean enough. It's a lot of experimental when it comes to illustration, but I bring it into the computer and now you can see I have all liner. I've gone in here and I've live trace things, I've done in here and I've painted in parts over and over trying to get where I want. That's the beauty of the computer, add in the piece of the o like you'd see in a magazine when someone's faces over top of it. I will show you guys quickly how to live trace things. This is the live trace sketch. Again, I'm not going to go too strong on teaching you guys how to use Illustrator. You don't even have to use Illustrator, you could try a different program or you just skip this step altogether. If you're a good drawer, you're a good artist, then you can just use your original sketch to transfer. You don't need to bring it into the computer. But for some of you, you won't be as uncomfortable and bringing things in the computer allows you to really experiment quickly, you can just move type, or maybe I want a little higher, this little lower, maybe I want the text a little bigger, so on and so forth. You can really easily go back and forth. Something that you can't do by hand without adding layers of onion, skin, paper and stuff. Anyway, so here we go. As I mentioned before, all of that is actually already just add on top.This is my scan. I'm going to go here to live trace. I could just click "Image Trace" that's what they call it there actually, and it's just going to try and do it as well as it can. But I'd like to go black and white logo, it's going to tell me it's too large because I have the scan as you can see at 300 ppi. I did scan in that gray-scale, but that's not too important. I click "Okay" because I don't care. It's going to try and start to do it itself, and it's actually not too bad. It's got a decent amount of some of the things that I want, and some of the lines are a little thin, so on, so forth. Depending on your sketching, you can go over here to the image trace panel, I just click that and click the advanced there, and you can play around with the threshold, try and see what difference that makes, what it's adding, what it's subtracting. You can see the lines are getting a bit thicker. Paths are the amount of little nodes that it takes to make up a shape, so sometimes adding more of those will have and some details. Noises are the same thing. If there's a little tiny piece here, and you have your noise set to 25 pixels. If it's smaller than that, it's not going to include it. If you strength that rate down [inaudible] details, again, it's not going to be two nodes, it's just going to be black, so here we go. Now you have just black and if you're happy with that, you just click "Expand" over here, and you can see that the entire illustration is just black. I made it gray just to match with this, and I'll change it from there, there you go. Now you have all vector artwork that you can go in here and with your brush, which is over here, you can play with the size, you can get in there and draw things, you can use your eraser tool to get rid of stuff. It's really easy to do an experiment, and that was my finished result for that. You can see I've experimented with adding and little pieces, trying to do stuff to make the text different. That's really important. You want everything to look a little bit different there. Here's what I'm thinking. This is my final print. The concept anyway, I'm going to put it on a dark navy paper. I'm going to use some gold ink, and it's really helpful if I can see what it's going to look like. Maybe it's because I'm a graphic designer that I've got that are really visual, I want to see what the finished product looks like before it's done. I try adding my logo in here. It's going to be really sloppy and hard to see when I actually go to curve it because it's so detailed saying what the rows I've really pushing that rope, I would say if this is your first print, not to do what I'm doing, don't do it so detailed, don't have all these little lines because it really adds to the complexity and a lot of them aren't going to show up. I know that going in and I'm willing to just see how well I can make work and what I can't experimental little bit on each print I do, so you might want to do that [inaudible] , stay away from all those details. There's a little bit of a difference from here to here. The main thing is that if I took this text was all just black and I turned it into this gold, and then I added a blue background, I'm actually going to get a very different result. Let's put that back there. See, what I've got is almost a negative image because of the way that I drew the line art and that's not what I want. Obviously, that looks wrong. It's because when I originally drew it, I drew it so that this is dark and the background is light. When I change that, I'm essentially inverting my image. Now, it works with some stuff. I'm happy with the text, I'm happy with some of the curtains here, but you can see that these books, maybe the crystal ball, the skull, the girl, all of that stuff is wrong. In there you want to just go and experiment. A lot of what I did, and if you want to know, is I would get in here, and I have to basically separate these parts. I would erase here. Of course I didn't work [inaudible] of this group, erase here, erase here, so on and so forth, and again, I'm just being sloppy. But that'll allow me to separate this from that and then I can start changing colors. What I would do is I would pick, I'm just going to lock this object so I can't select it, just I don't need you right now. What I would do is I pick a weird color, maybe some green, and I grab my brush and I would paint in the inside of the girl, the stuff that I want to see when I get there. Again, I would take my time a little bit more than I'm doing right now. Well, just for the sake of showing you guys how I did this. It got real sloppy. Just select the same color. You can click on it. Because if you go like this, you're now going to have a bunch of different pieces you don't want selected. You can either click on and go select same fill color and you'll get all that green and other cool thing is to use the wand tool, which is why on your keyboard, click that, it'll select all the same green. We're going to go over to pathfinder. I'm going to use merge and then I'm going to use unite, which turns out all on a solid color. I'm going to put it near the back, and so now you can see. What I would do really quickly is I would turn this to blue again, this isn't going to be perfect, but I'm just giving you the idea of turning this to gold and start selecting some of these elements in here, in the girl's face, and just started doing that and a lot of that back and forth, back and forth, and then before you know it, this is what you have. This is my final color palette right over here, and so yeah, this is what I want. What I do now is I go, I make sure everything's ungrouped. I'm going to delete my background and then grab this. You can turn it to a black, you can turn it to a gray and maybe a light gray, something like that. What I'd like to do even easier is I will go with a blue. I might put that to 50 percent, and then I print it out like this and I'm going to show you guys some different ways to basically draw over this with pencil that way you can mirror that and turn it on to your block print, and I'm also going to tell you about how you could take this to a local print shop, print it with a thermal printer and transfer it using some gel mediums or some matte medium. Stay tuned and we'll see you guys on the next video. Thanks. 4. Transferring Your Sketch: When it comes to taking your print and turning it or transferring it onto the material, there's different types of material actually. This is your typical linoleum. It's been mounted to a woodblock. I don't actually use this very much because it's just really hard to cut out of. Since some people heated in the alphabet and so on and so forth. But there's a lot of other materials that are there that are way easier to carbon to and the result is the exact same. There's soft cut, which I don't have right here. But this is what's called softoleum, its just a slightly different material. You can see it's really bendy and easy to use. Obviously, you can't see the carving process of it, like, how easy it is to use, but it is pretty easy. I'm going to show you the transferring. Going back to the normal linoleum for a second. You can actually transfer onto here pretty easily with carbon copy. I find that for some reason, it doesn't work very well on the softoleum, which is what I use mostly. There's a few different ways to do it. The two ways that I either use, I use what's called matte medium or multi-medium. Basically, what it is, it's almost like a clear acrylic, and what you'd have to do is you take your print to your local print shop and make sure that they print it out using a toner printer. If you do that, you use this with a paintbrush and you paint at all over a nice thick coat onto the linoleum and then a nice thick coat onto the paper, and you push it down and you would rub it and stick it down. Once it's like and you want to just use normal printer paper, not a thick card, it's just like this, and once it's pushed down and all good. You just leave it overnight. You want to make sure you leave for like 8-10 hours. Then once you've done that, once you've allowed it to dry that long. What you do is you just soak the back of it using like, a spray bottle of water and you would rub it and the paper will actually crumble off, and the print will be left onto the linoleum. That's really useful basically, if you have a really complicated print and you want to take your time redrawing it 10 times just to transfer it. For this method, I'm going to just show you the second option, which will probably work out a little easier for you guys. Especially, if you don't want to have to go out and buy or take it to a print shop or do any of that stuff. What I've done is, I've just printed this on my home printer or something you may not even, you might just skip the whole printer computer step and have your straight sketch, which works. If you do it this way, I've just used blue, so that when I draw over top of it, I can really easily see what I've drawn and what's the printer ink. So basically, what I'll do is I'll just show you just a quick method of it. I'm not going to show you the whole process because it would be long and boring. But if I take this, I just quickly draw over some of the places, and then I take that,and then I turned it over in your lineup is best like hand. I might use a spoon. Here is your thumb. You can use a barrier or whatever, and you just push real hard, and then what you should find, just to try and take a peek at it slowly and you will see that it's transferred over onto there. Now that it's transferred, what I do is I take a Sharpie, I draw over top of either this or the reverse. A lot of the times, I'll do the opposite. I'll try and show you a quick example of that. Let's do a letter here, so you can see what I'm going to do. I'm using a 7B pencil. You don't have to, you can just use an HB. I just find that it's just a really dark pencil and it transfers easier, and I'm going to do this too perfectly right now because time is of the essence. Another cool thing is if you're using plain paper, you can actually start to see the color through it, which can't really do with mine. Then if you actually draw on the back, you're really going to help transfer it well. Again, I'm just using a scrap piece of this softoleum but there's my B and I look where it is roughly here, at least to push really tough. I'll see how well is transferring, not bad. Hopefully, you can see there that they've got the B. Then what I would do is I would take my Sharpie, and because that is the piece that you want left up. So that's going to transfer over to your paper. What I usually do is I actually draw the opposite. I'll follow around the outside of it. Basically, anything I want to carve is going to become black with my sharpie. Now to be too perfect, and I scribble around. Once you get on a real complicated trend, it becomes a little bit trickier to see or remember what you're carving and what you're not carving. I would do something like that and then I carve everything that's black, and let me use an eraser, I should erase the pencils so that helps me not get confused. The only reason I do it this way instead of actually just failing in the B. Is because this is going to be left when I carve out everything else. If I left the B in there, I'm just going to have my carved linoleum is just going to look like a black Sharpie, so rather it just be the original tone when it's done. I'm going to finish drawing out my sketch here and get ready to transfer it, and we'll go on to the next step. 5. Carving Your Linoleum: Okay, so we've made it to the carving. Everything has been sharpied in, so, we're just going to grab some pieces. I happen to have a few different ones. Now, obviously you can just buy one of these, you don't need five of them or whatever, but I taught a couple classes, so I've got some extras. Let's see, I've got a 1, 2, need to have basically have one of each. I put a five in here, and now we get a three. It's good enough for now actually. These are all speed ball, speed ball handles, speed ball blades, I'm sure you can get other brand names, they just seem to be biggest. With mine, I want to carve away everything that's white. The easiest thing to do usually is just to start with a five or some big piece and just start digging in. Start somewhere where you've got some room to mess up, make mistakes, because it's going to take a while to get a feel of it. You've got to figure out how deep you're going, you want to go pretty deep usually, so, that way there's more space between the bottom, and I don't know how to word it, but the 3D top that way. You're not going to get ink coming as much from the bottom onto the print where you don't want it to be. You want a little bit there, but it'll happen naturally. Usually the other thing you can do, let's see either three, just as a couple of tips is that, you can push pretty deep with a three and you can get way deep in there, but if you also barely touch the surface, you can actually get a really thin and detailed line. So even just a three will actually get me into these really small detailed spots just because I'm not going to push as deep. So don't try and get too deep, if you have little tiny pieces like I do, don't go too deep around them because they can get ripped out as you're moving and cutting. Just try and get those little tiny, thin lines around them and then around the edges, around the border, any of these big chunks, those are where you're going to trying to cut deeper. I'm just going to carve for a while and show you what it looks like when it's done. 6. Printing: Okay, so here we go. This is the most important part. This is everything you've worked towards, we are going to get the print done. I'll just quickly tell you the tools. Hopefully we can all see this. This is a brayer. It's just used to pick up the ink and rolling onto the block and then obviously we'll transfer with it. So yeah, it's called a brayer. You can just call it a roller or whatever. This is a baren. Once we get this paper on top of this, we're going to place it here just to push this, basically you use your hand, just helps to speed up the process, and then you peel this off and you'll have a nice finish print. This, I just use to get the ink onto the acrylic because there's little sheet of acrylic, obviously it keeps your desk clean. What I'm actually using today is speed ball block printing ink. It's water-soluble. I'm using gold. Hopefully, you can see that there. I've also got just handy, an ink retarder, which basically is just going to slow the drying time. You just mix that in with the ink and it waters it down. Once again, I'm going to use metallic colors. Sometimes you need that. I haven't used gold before, so we're going to see how it goes. This here is just a woodblock. I've made it with a frame. The reason why I have it isn't so much for this, you can basically just do this straight on the desk like so. I have it in case we're creating two color prints, because I think it's really important that the block is in the exact same spot and the paper's in the same spot. That way the registration line's up. But I use it anyway, you want to do in a one colored print. Aside from that, you just want a nice rug. This is a cool t-shirt. It's been destroyed. Otherwise, just get some paper towel. You just never know when you're going to get messy, you can get on your hands. So you might want to wipe your hands so that you don't get it all over the back side of the sheet. I'm using French paper. I think this is the construction, I can't remember, and it's like electric blue or what the blue colors color, but it's a nice navy color. Yeah. So let's get this going. Sometimes these don't come in tubes, they'll come in a big bottle. That's what I use this one mostly. If it's in a tube, we're just going to put a little line across here. That's just really runny, so we're going to have to mix it in good. We're just going to go backwards and forwards. Going to need to use a lot more than that over time, but I think that started. Let me leave the lid off this, so we can get this process going. So I'm just going to put some more on here. The consistency is pretty important. What you want is, you want that Velcro sound. Hopefully you can hear that. If you don't have that Velcro sound, that means you're probably a little bit too runny. But you also don't want to be too thick. So we're just going to experiment with that to see how it goes. So just roll on here, nice and flat. I can already see because my print's black, that I don't really have enough ink on there. So let's get it, let's get some real ink on there. There you go. I'm trying to get gold. I want to do this quickly, I'm going a little bit slower than I normally would. Cut that paper lined up there. I have to move it. Get the parameter pushed down. Again, this is all dependent on speed. Peel that up, and there we go, a block print, everything you've worked towards. Looks awesome. I'm going to do a few more. You can see it needs a little link there, so I'm going to push some more in here. I've lost some details in places like I figured I would. I'm not going to stress it. The letters look okay, they're fairly readable. Yeah, I got the texture that I wanted there. So the consistency I'm fairly happy with. So I'm just going to put this. I've got a old-school drying rack behind me, some of the clothing. This stuff, I am probably going to need to use some of these ink retarder. It shouldn't have to just keep pouring it out and out. That may be too much. So you saw that I've already put down a lot of ink and it's just drying really quickly on my acrylic, too quickly for my liking. So that's where this ink retarder comes in. Like I said, it's going to be less important. Now you hear that? Now it doesn't have a Velcro sound. So it's too runny right now. But it also livened up the ink that's on there. We're going to get a little bit more on here just so that we can get that Velcro sound back, get the right consistency, you're going to have to start to take a bit of that. There we go. It's a little bit runny right now, but that's all right. It means we're going to get a lot of ink on here. That's what we want. I'm sure that pushed in the other corner. Again, my movement is a bit limited because of this running. Because of [inaudible] I'm going to make sure you get everywhere, get to the corner, just trying to get everything nice and even. It won't take too long. Peel it up, boom, there we go, keep going. Hopefully you guys have enjoyed this class, it's really fun teaching it. I hope that you've learned something. I hope that if you've done it before, you picked up some new tricks. I hope that if you haven't done it before, that you've got a new addiction. I'm really looking forward to seeing you in these classes. I love doing this. I think it's a lot of fun. It's a neat way to get your hands dirty and create something really original and unique and handmade. They're fun, and you actually can sell, give away as Christmas gifts, give away as presents, whatever. So I'm most apt to see what you guys did. I'm used to what I've done. I've seen my own work, but what really excites me is seeing what you guys think. So that's there. I'm just going to keep going. I'm going to use all of those sheets, I have, I think about 20 or 30. Don't expect them all to work out, some of them aren't going to look at, some of them are going to have mistakes that you don't like. You can live with most of them. That's the beauty of the process is that it's imperfect. Don't be afraid to use some of the ones that aren't quite perfect. But if you've got some real mistakes in there, like in this case of ours, I didn't get enough ink on the face or something like that, and now the face is missing, that's obviously not acceptable. So that one is not going to work. So if I print 30, I'm not going to be too surprised if I narrow it down to 20 or something like that. That's just the nature of the process for me. Okay, so I'm going to apply this stuff, I'm going to keep going, print the rest of them, and I will see you guys on the other side. Thanks so much for enjoying the class and looking at it. Again, I'm really accessible, you can get me on Twitter, Instagram, Dribble, Facebook, Behance, all that stuff. Pretty much just @JonBrommet on everything. That's J-O-N B-R-O-M-M-E-T. Again, thanks so much guys. I really appreciate it. Talk to you later. Bye. 7. Wrap Up: All right guys, we've reached the end, this is the wrap up. Thanks so much for taking the class. I hope you guys enjoyed all the videos and things that I could show you. I've probably inevitably missed a few things but I tried my best to cover everything. If you have any questions, go to discussion, or you can tweet me, Instagram, whatever @jonbrommet like I said in the last video. There's a couple little clips that I'm showing of some of my other prints and of course, the fortune teller print. If you want to buy any of these prints, just go to www.jonbrommet.com. Click on the "Shop" and then I'll take you for the shameless plug. Yeah, like I said, I hope you guys learned something. I really want to see your projects. I'm excited to see what you guys did. Please post those even if you're at the very beginning stages, and then on that like I said, just hit the up for discussion, if you have any questions, any comments, any feedback, if you want to let me know that you hate my voice, whatever, I don't blame you. Yeah, thanks very much guys and again, hope you enjoyed it. Take care. Bye. Bye. 8. Reduction Method & Quick Stamp Examples: Hello again, and welcome to a Bonus Video. It's been a few months since I posted the class. I thought I'll just do a little update. I noticed in some of the reviews that you guys wanted to know how to do multiple colors so I figured I'd show you a couple of ways. There's reduction, keyframes, registration. There's a few different methods for printing multiple colors. But I'm just going to show you a little bit about it. I'm not going to go way in depth, because this class is just an intro, and I think you guys should figure that stuff on your own, but I'll give you a stepping stone to work from. Thanks so much for all that you've done to make this class as popular as it is. Few days ago, we passed 500, and I think we're on our way to 600 already, and it's growing so fast, it will be way past that, I'm sure soon. Thanks, I hope you guys enjoy the video, and maybe, I'll add another video, but if not, I definitely have some new classes that I'm working on. If you guys think that there's anything that I can improve on, please let me know so that I can use those stepping stones when I move forward into my next classes, and hopefully, you guys will join me there. I can't tell you what they are yet, but I think it'll be fun, and I think most of you guys will be interested in what they are too. Thanks and check it out. Welcome to my living room coffee table. I put together this all drawing so I could do this Bonus Video for you. What's going to happen, is that I'm actually going to do all three colors out of the same block. I'm going to start by just carving away just the white, and then carve some more, do the next color, carve some more, do the next color. The reason why I actually don't use this method is because it's destructive. You can make as many prints as you want the first time, but after that, you've ruined the block because you've carved away the color that you had. But it's a good way to do it, inexpensively. I'm just using a little three inch by three inch soft [inaudible] piece that I have left over. It's a legitimate method so I want to show you guys at least how it works. I'll show you guys once we get to the next part. We got this thing inked. As you can see, what I ended up doing is, I took it to a window so I could see through, and I just traced the spots that I needed to. I tried it the first time, which is covering the entire thing with pencil and I found it was making too much of a mess and the lines weren't clear. But this worked really well, and then you don't have to draw on the side anyway, you just scrape it down. I actually use this like little engraving, stylus, or whatever you want to call it. There it is. I would suggest if you have different colors of sharpies, that you use them, because this can get very confusing, especially, if it's your first time. I'm going to start carving it out, and I'll show you guys the next part. Before I get too far into the carving, here's the first bit done. I've carved away all the white. I still have the red, orange, and black left. But I want to show you guys pretty quickly that you can use any kind of this linoleum to also make a stamp. I've got a little black stamp pad right here, and I'm going to just go like this. Now, the stamp pad, as you can see, is pretty small. So I'm going to push it real hard over the whole thing, like so, and then I'll take this, and I'll just flip it and put it on my page. I'm not going to use anything fancy. I'm just going to use my hand. You can make a handle if you want out of wood or whatever. There you go. Pretty cool stamp. Let's just wash this right off, and then you go back, and do whatever you want. Of course, you can make it on any color. But I just want to show you the first layer. Now, again, into the actual block printing, but yes, stamps are really easy to make and they're pretty cool. I know it costs quite a bit of money to get one like laser, or engrave, or whatever so make one yourself. The next step. This is the reduction process. I've carved out my block. At this point, we're just going to start with the lightest color, and then work our way to the darkest color. We're going to do the orange first, then the red, then the black. You may be able to hear some motorcycles outside. But anyway so I've got some fluorescent orange here. As you can see, I've also made myself a little jig with some paint lines so that I can make sure that I have the block exactly in the same spot with each one. I'm going to look over these lines, and make sure I get that paper where I want it to. Push this down, it's just a little bit tricky, because there's not a whole lot of space. Then there we go. That's the first color. I'm going to do this a bunch more times, and then I will show you guys the next color and how it goes. I've cut away all the orange, and I've just got left now my red and my black layer. Basically with each color, it's going to cover up the next color as well. The places that are going to be black in my next color pass are also going to be red right now. But that's just how the process works. I have my camera basically directly in my own way. I'm going to try and make this work anyway. But here's my orange layer, and let's see, if we can make this work here. I set my own camera. Let's try and get some more ink here. I've got a little bit too runny. I need to get it more, that velcro sound as I've told you before. But I'll see how this goes. Like I said, it's a little hard to line up. As you can see, I have this tape here, which is giving me my right edge. I'm using the board as my bottom edge. So hopefully, I can get the registration pretty close, and may not be perfect. But it's hard with block printing to be perfect. Bumped my own camera here. So let's see how color number two comes out. There we go. We getting colorful. The next color is going to be black, and that will be the end of it. I did a lot of prints. I did like 75 prints or something like that on both white and crafts. I'll show you both. There you go. On the next part. We've reached the final color. I'll show you an example here. Again, I've got this camera right in my way, but there is the two colors. That's the red and the orange on the white paper and the orange on the craft paper. As you can see on my block that I've carved away all the spots that had the red and the orange. Now, I'm left with just what's going to be the black. Let's see what it looks like. For those of you that noticed a few things did change from my original sketch on my block, but I had to roll with it as I was going. I know that certain details weren't going to come out the same as I originally thought, so I just try to improvise, and figure it out. It's really hard to align this guy up properly with the camera in the way, but hopefully, we can get it close enough to give you the example. There we go.That's my final print. This is the reduction process, cutting away each layer until you have the final layer left on the block. But as you see, it's very permanent. The only thing I think is neat about this is, I like the black outlines just on their own. I might be able to use that later on down the road on its own. I might be able to color in by hand, or even just leave it as a stamp, like I showed you guys earlier. I hope you enjoyed learning this. Talk to you soon. Bye. Now, hopefully you guys know a little bit about how to make multiple color block prints. I hope you guys enjoyed it. You might have learned a few things about how to make stamps. If you guys want to follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all that stuff, I use Instagram the most, it's at Jon Brommet. Please post your projects. I'd love to see you guys do at least your quotes to get an idea of what you're thinking. We'll see you guys in the next class or maybe another Bonus Video. Thanks so much. I'll talk to you later. 9. A Message From Future Jon: Wait, one more thing. I'm adding this. This is future Jon Brommet talking to you. I hope you enjoyed the class that you just watched. Some of these classes have been recorded a few years ago, so I just wanted to give a little up to date on what I'm doing now. You can see that I've put out a ton of classes potentially from the class that you just watched as you may have been watching one of my older classes. If you go over to my profile, you can click it somewhere on the Skillshare website or go to Skillshare dot com slash Jon Brommet. It's spelled just like that with no H, it's J-O-N. You'll see here I've got things broken down in my newest classes. This may even look slightly different for you because I'm putting out classes once a month right now. I've got my most popular classes, illustration, efficiency in Illustrator, Photoshop stuff, and then, all of my other classes. Make sure that if it's not already selected, you click "See More" to see the rest of it, so many different classes. I hope you guys will be inspired to learn lots more, and hopefully, you're enjoying my classes and want to see more. If that's not enough, I'm at Jon Brommet on Instagram so you can check out my Instagram as well to know what I'm doing, and I post all of my new artwork there, and of course, to let you know when I'm doing new Skillshare stuff. I've started a YouTube channel where I put short videos that are instructional. I obviously advertise it with my Skillshare class, but short videos that I can't really put a whole class out, I put here on YouTube. I even do things like have conversations with other teachers, like Tabitha Park, plan to do that stuff more often. If you head over to Jon Brommet dot com, I've newly updated my website. I have a digital shop where you can grab my Procreate brushes or other things like that. On top of seeing that my different portfolio elements and things like that, I've also got an Etsy shop, which I'll click here and it would open this. You can buy all of my pens and different art things that I've created. I will ship them to you from here. I've got them all produced here in my home and they look awesome, and I know that they're cool. I just recently started a Threadless shop, which you could click here. Of course, there's about in Skillshare and contact. Everything is linked from my website. This new Threadless shop has all my merch that can be printed on demand on a really weirdly wild variety of things like, I don't know, let's just click one of these things here. It's going to open a T-shirt, but let's just say maybe instead of a T-shirt you wanted, I don't know, what? A duvet cover or shower curtains? Why wouldn't you want those things? I don't know. Anyway, I've got lots of different things going on. If you'd like what I'm doing, please check out more of it, and I'll keep making more things. Thanks, everyone. Bye bye.