Thanks to my friend Jeremy, I now have a stack of Marmoleum blocks to make prints from. I've been trying to lay my hands on some offcuts for ages, to try it out, but could only find people who would sell it to me off the roll for an arm and a leg.
I've cut down the piece that he gave me into nine each of A3-ish and A5-ish, about 20 at A4, and a miscellany of odd sizes cut off the edges. That will keep me going for a while.
Marmoleum is a brand name for a commercial linoleum flooring, but it's harder and more robust than the lino available at retail for printmaking. Chris Pig speculates that it might have marble dust in the mix because of the name.
It is fairly expensive as flooring — when I sourced it off the roll, they quoted me about $165 per linear metre, with a minimum of two metres plus $65 to ship it down to me in Christchurch. Let's call it $400-ish for a batch. However, the pile in this photo is less than a metre off the roll, and the nine A3 blocks alone would cost me near enough to $500 from the arts supply shops in town. So, if you have the cash up front, or can put together a consortium to spread the cost, it works out much, much cheaper than buying so-called printmakers' lino. And it's much better.
I did a very quick little block, just to see how it cuts and prints, and it cuts like a dream.
It is a lot stiffer and more robust than the printmakers' lino, but it has a smooth, creamy texture, and cuts very easily and smoothly.
It will still break off small unsupported bits if you attack it too vigorously, so you do still need to take reasonable care with cutting fine detail.
I have not yet tried cutting very fine detail with a knife; that's still in the future. However, I have seen Chris Pig working the surface of a marmoleum block with a wood-engraving multiple tool, which indicates to me that it will take very fine detail.
It prints well too, though the blocks do require a bit of preparation before you start using them (see below).
This test print is a bit blotchy, but to be fair I wasn't taking quite the care I should have about inking up, paper quality, felt quality, and all the other bajillion variables that go into making a relief print.
Plus, making a virtue of necessity, I quite like the unevenness of the ink coverage, as long as it's not too egregious. If I want perfectly smooth fields of colour, there are better sorts of printmaking for that end. Screen printing, for example.
This image should display on your screen at about 100% of the print size, but of course that will depend on your own screen resolution.
The surface accepts the ink pretty well. This is just Flint water-based ink, so nothing very special. I don't have any oil-based inks, as I don't really have the facilities for easy clean-up, so I don't know how it reacts with them. I suspect they'd be better.
Block Preparation
Block preparation is very straightforward.
Like any lino, Marmoleum straight off the roll has a slightly uneven, polished texture to its surface, and that needs to be removed or else it will print a whole lot of white speckles. It flattens out very quickly and easily with a wet-&-dry sponge block, used wet. I have two of them, a reasonably fine "all-purpose" sanding block, and a fine finishing block, but the fine block isn't really necessary for this. Sand the surface until you've raised a decent slurry, and be sure to cover every inch of the surface.
One caveat: the back of the marmoleum is reinforced with an open-weave jute or hessian mesh, and if it gets wet, it shrinks and deforms the block. It pays, therefore, to keep the back dry as much as possible while scrubbing down the top surface.
I sanded down the feather block (above) against the side of our laundry hand basin, so that any water fell away and into the sink rather than creeping around behind the marmoleum. That seemed to work pretty well, but I was also being a bit careful to limit the amount of water I was using — just enough to keep the surface liquid.
Possibly you could seal the back with shellac or an oil- or spirit-based polyurethane before sanding; I haven't tried that yet.
After sanding, wipe the surface down clean, removing as much of the sanding slurry as you can, and then degrease the surface by wiping it down with liberal amounts of meths.
Once the surface was flattened, I painted it with a diluted black acrylic ink. This darkens it, and makes it much easier to see where you've cut into the surface. It doesn't need to be very dark, just darker than the natural colour of the marmoleum. In fact if it is too dark, it will make it more difficult to transfer an image on to the block for cutting. You'll just have to experiment to get the ideal dilution.
Once all this is done, you're ready to get an image on to the block by any of the usual methods (spirit or graphite transfer, gridding etc.) and start cutting.
It cuts easily enough that you could use those awful red-handled linocutting gouges with the interchangeable blades they use in schools, but honestly, get yourself some decent gouges. You won't regret it.
Later...
This is a state print, taken part way through the cutting process to give me an accurate idea of how the cutting is going, and where I might need to cut more.
Unfortunately there's not a lot I can do about the areas where I should have cut less.
The ink has reactivated the marker I used to draw the grid and sketch in the image, and the pressure of the press has transferred it along with the ink. Hopefully, when the ink dries on the block, it will seal it and prevent this happening again.
