I am back again with another Artful Review! Like I mentioned last time I got multiple boxes, including some older ones when I made my subscription in September, that’s why I have so many to review^^ But for the people who don’t know what Artful is, it’s actually a quarterly subscription box from the UK meaning that you will get a new one every 3 months. Every new box will focus on a specific theme, exploring different art mediums and supplying you with different materials. Some of the old boxes’ themes include water coloring, calligraphy, and drawing with ink. This month’s box is themed after Lino printing, let’s take a look into it together!

The first thing we get in the box is a Lino cutter from Essdee with 10 extra cutting blades in different sizes, then a 112-page magazine with tutorials and interviews, 3 lino sheets (200mx150mmx3.2mm), two tubes of special block printing ink in red and black, a block with 25 sheets of premium heavyweight cartridge paper, a clear 200 micro A4 Acetate sheet and a 100mm ink roller. Compared to all the other Artful boxes I have reviewed up till now, this seems to be the one with the least amount of items in it. I can’t tell if that’s because these items are very pricey, meaning all boxes have the same value but some might be fuller and some less. Or maybe this was one of the first boxes and the budget wasn’t as high. I don’t necessarily feel like something is missing, since I actually don’t know anything about lino printing yet and all of the items seem to be of very high quality. After taking a look into the magazine in more detail, I might come back to this though.

Now that I have read through the magazine in more detail, I have actually already found something that bugs me a little bit. As I have just mentioned I was not sure if something was missing, but now I am. There are at least 3 things, which are talked about in the magazine, which could have easily been included. The first thing is tracing paper, which they say “you might have laying around in a drawer”, I personally never use that for anything, so now I have not. The second thing is sandpaper, which seems to be used for the ink sticking better to the lino or making textures, which they might think we get together with the third missing thing, being recommended by them in the magazine, an “anti-slip matt” from a hardware store. I do agree that all of these things could be already in a household of either an artist who has to trace for their work or maybe a handyman, who used sandpaper to make his wood creations smoother. But that’s not how a subscription box like that should work, I should be able to open it and begin working with what they supplied me with. The tracing paper and the sandpaper sound to be somewhat essential and also don’t cost much I assume it would have been no problem to put it in. The “anti-slip matt” seems to be more optional, but is still recommended, so why not include it?

What I really like about the magazine is that it feel way more beginner-friendly than some of the stuff in the previous boxes. In the beginning, they encourage you to use the 3 sheets they supplied in the box to start and experiment at first, not get into creating ASAP. That will be very hard for me to do, for the exact reason they state in the beginning pages “Not wasting resources” but the way they explained it, it’s not wasting, it’s kinda like creating your own color shart to know how the colors will look like on paper. That’s what you are doing, trying out the different nibs and what kinds of shapes and lines you can make with them and to make notes about it, maybe already planning a future masterpiece. When you are about to get started but have no idea what to carve yet, they have some templates with easy to recreate shapes to get on exploring the medium. Nothing as crazy as some of the tutorials seen in the ink boxes magainze(review coming soon ;)! They also tell you many important things about the shelf-live of Lino, the right methods to store and wash it, and how to carefully use the tools right. All of that information got me really hyped up to finally try out some lino printing myself, but first, let’s get on to carving 😉

Since I am trying out the box in October I was in the mood for some spooky designs and I had some pretty finished ideas in my head already. I wanted to make a Halloween stamp with a pumpkin and a potion bottle design(the ghost kinda appeared :P), but to get it from my head onto the Lino was a pretty challenging process. I used an H4 graphite pencil (which was not included) to draw my ideas directly onto the Lino, which did only partially work out. I did not want to put too much pressure on the pencil, because I did not want to leave marks in the lino, which I would not be able to get rid of again. But the graphite did not really stick to the surface that well, so I needed to go over and over it again. I then traced the lines of the design I wanted to have with the cutter and then made an outline in form of a rectangle. After finishing that task I tried to work my way inward, regretting small details like the pumpkin face xD But I did it in the end and was pretty proud for it being my first try, but also kinda nervous about if it would look the way I wanted it in the end, after applying the printing ink and transferring the designs onto paper…

The next step seemed fairly easy, but it was not xD After carving the pieces I cut them out with scissors to be able to print them onto the paper individually. I only used a small bit of the black printing ink, which can be compared to very thick acrylc paint, and apllied it to the right side of the roller, because my lino pieces were fairly small. I then went over the lino pieces multiple times, hoping for an even covarage, but intially also filing the small cravices which ment to stay ink-free. You can also see that in the first results, my small ghost is basically a black blob on the page. As for my potion bottle I actually regrett my choice of having the liqguid inside stay white and the glassy ouside be black. I can’t really say I planned it liked that, I only thought it about those two things being able to be distinguished from each other. That at least workes I guess 😛 My halloween stamp came ou the best I think, you can make out the shape of the pumkin and it’s face, even if it’s not perfect and the seem around the stamp is visible too, even though you could see that the bigger space made it even harder for me to get it covered evenly. But with practice, especially with the aplling ink part, I can see this workng very well for me and I can take all the information I got out of my errors to make my next lino pieces came out better 😉

This was actually the first Artful box which let me work with materials I have never used before. I did caligraphy as a hobby and I used water colors in school as I mentioned in the previous reviews but Lino printing was never something on my radar, I don’t think I would have picked it up to try out by myself. But it was actually quite fun, maybe because it was so diffrent! Carving out my designs instead of creating them step by step on the paper, was a very intresting experience. It was both easier and harder than I thought, if that makes sense 😛 For my very first try it did not feel as if anything was missing, though some tracing paper and maybe a marker of some kind which would stick better to the Lino would have been nice. But I guess the other things were not as needed as I thought when reading about them the magazin. I am still curious about the sandpaper and what could be done with it. But the Artfulbox is supposed to just ignite the curiousity in my and this one really succeded. Mabye I will buy sandpaper and try it out some 😉 And maybe you will too, I can highly recommend this box and the idea behind Artufl as a subscription as well^^

Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress