Lino and block
printing layers

Why relief printing needs the opposite of a halftone

Screen printing puts ink through a mesh, so a tone can be faked with dots of varying size. Relief printing does not work that way. A roller charges the raised surface of the block with a solid, opaque film of ink, and whatever is raised prints at full strength. There is no such thing as 40% ink from a lino block.

You could, in theory, carve a halftone dot pattern. In practice nobody does, because carving several hundred dots per square centimetre by hand is not printmaking, it is penance. Relief work handles tone the other way round: by reducing the image to flat shapes and letting the overlap between inks do the rest.

So the separation you need is the same idea as a screen printing separation with one setting inverted: one layer per colour, but solid, hard-edged, and with no screening at all.

The two ways to print more than one colour

Multi-block

One block per colour. You carve as many blocks as you have inks, print them one after another onto the same sheet, and keep the blocks for future editions. It costs more lino and demands accurate registration, but nothing is destroyed and you can reprint the edition later.

Reduction (the "suicide print")

One block, carved away in stages. Print the lightest colour across the whole edition, carve away everything that should stay that colour, print the next darkest, and so on. Each stage destroys the previous state, so the edition size is fixed the moment you start and there is no reprinting, ever.

Reduction printing rewards planning more than any other technique in this guide. A separation printed out on paper, one sheet per stage, is the closest thing to a safety net you get.

Getting the layers out of the tool

1. Load your artwork and set the number of inks to the number of blocks or stages you plan to print.
2. Sort the inks out. Merge anything that should be carved as one colour, and set each ink to the colour you will actually roll up. The live preview shows the printed result, which is genuinely useful for planning a reduction print: you can see whether four colours will read before you cut anything.
3. Turn the halftone raster off. This is the setting that matters here. Instead of dots, every layer becomes solid black where the ink goes and white where it does not. The mesh preset is ignored, because there is no mesh.
4. Set the print width to the actual size of your block, in millimetres or inches, and print at 100%.

What comes out is not a film. It is a carving guide: a solid shape map per colour, at the exact size of the block, with registration marks and a labelled margin telling you which layer it is.

Mirroring: the part that catches everyone

A relief block prints mirrored. Whatever you carve appears flipped on the paper, which is why text on a block has to be cut backwards. So the question is not whether to mirror your guide, but how many times it gets flipped before it reaches the lino.

The tool mirrors by default, because that is what screen printing films need, and prints "MIRRORED" in the margin when it does. For relief work, decide which row of that table you are in before you print, and check the margin label rather than trusting your memory at the bench.

Registration between blocks

Every colour after the first has to land in the same place. Two approaches, both older than any of us:

• A registration jig. A board with a right angle for the block and another for the paper, so both drop into the same position every time. Cheap to build from scrap and accurate enough for most work.
• Kento marks, the Japanese moku hanga method: a corner notch and an edge notch cut into the block itself, into which the paper is seated. Elegant, and it travels with the block.

The registration marks and crop ticks printed in the margin of each layer give you a common reference across all of them — align the marks, and the layers align.

Design for imperfect registration

Hand-printed relief will never register as tightly as a press, so design as though it will move a little, because it will.

• Let colours overlap deliberately. A shape that runs slightly under its neighbour hides a white gap; two shapes that merely touch will show one.
• Use a key block. Printing a dark outline layer last, over the colours instead of under them, hides small registration errors — a trick some printmakers use deliberately. Traditional ukiyo-e printing actually runs it the other way round: the key block goes down first, and the colours are fitted inside it.
• Print light to dark. Opaque dark ink covers light ink; the reverse does not work.
• Remember overprinting is free colour. Two transparent inks crossing give you a third. Three blocks can read as six colours.

Be aware of one honest limitation: the tool does not spread or choke shapes for trapping. If you want a deliberate overlap, build it into the artwork before you separate, or carve a fraction outside the line.

What happens to gradients

With the raster off, every tone is decided at the halfway point: anything at or above 50% coverage becomes solid, anything below becomes blank. A soft gradient therefore turns into a hard-edged shape, which is the correct answer for a carving guide but can be a surprise the first time.

If a gradient matters to the image, the relief answer is more layers, not dots: three tints of the same blue printed as three shapes read as a gradient from a metre away. Set more inks, merge what you do not need, and let the preview tell you whether it reads.

This applies beyond lino

Anything that prints solid ink from a raised or cut surface has the same requirement: woodcut, rubber and vinyl blocks, potato and foam printing in a classroom, letterpress from polymer plates, and hand-cut stencils. In each case the useful output is a solid shape per colour at exact size, not a screened film.

Stencil work has one extra rule the software cannot enforce: an island in the middle of a cut-out shape needs a bridge to hold it, or it falls out. Check your shapes for floating islands before you cut.

Common questions

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