Ho Ho Ho! Greetings card now available

Do you know someone who loves sprouts?

Or maybe you want to help someone who hates sprouts get over their phobia with a bit of greetings card-based aversion therapy?

This ‘Ho Ho Ho’ greetings card is a reproduction of a linocut relief print. I decided to make this a reduction linocut because I wanted the “o”s to be not the letter “o” but sprouts.

Best of all when I printed the various layers of the print, the sprouts came out with a exactly the ‘Ladybird book’ style to them that I had planned.

Reduction linocuts work like this:

1. First of all I cut the capital “H”s and the whole shape of each sprout. I inked the sprouts with the lightest colour (yellow) and printed them.

2. I cut away any yellow area of each sprout. With no raised areas of lino to print over them these areas would stay yellow in the final print.

I printed the palest green areas next. These would end up as the veins on the leaves—it takes some planning to get your head around what to cut, and when in a reduction linocut!

3. I cut away the veins so that they would remain pale green and inked the block with the main “sprout green” colour.

4. Now they’re really starting to look like sprouts! A final touch for the sprouts was to cut away most of the leaf colour, leaving only small areas of what remained of the sprout areas of the lino block that would print as the darkest blue-green shadows.

5. And finally, once the sprouts had dried, I printed the “H”s in black ink. Yes, those nice looking Hs are lino prints, too—sometimes I like to challenge myself to cut the exact lines of a font face! ;)