cut 4

cut 4: keymap

Background

Not only do I have a cool kids keyboard, I also now have the coolest kids keymap cheat sheets next to it, for when I forget where the backslash key is seventeen times a day 😍

(And also a dedicated em-dash key 💪💪💪 but that is a different conversation.)

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— Steven Hicks (@pepopowitz.bsky.social) December 31, 2024 at 10:47 AM

Outcome

I still can't figure out the correct amount of ink/pressure when inking. I also used the speedball water-based inks, because I wanted color, and that contributed. Basically two prints before the ink is drying and I'm over-inking to compensate, and then the details get flooded.

But the carve was great, and I am very happy with the design.

things I learned along the way

• drawings exported from procreate don't have a ton of detail. They get pretty pixelated when printed.
  • edit from future: I changed my default canvas dimensions in procreate to 4x screen resolution, and printed from figma at 1/4 scale. This helped a lot.
• tiny line marks are going to be impossible to carve! I should set a minimum on the pen width or something
  • edit from future: actually with good carving tools (I got a couple pfeil cutters for Christmas) this is not so bad. I thought the 1mm v worked great, but the 1mm u was even better.
• acetone transfer didn't work well for me.
  • the paper got lots of wrinkles as it soaked
  • the ink didn't really transfer very well
  • I wonder if it's because I wasn't using pure acetone?
    • edit from future: yes. Pure acetone worked much better in cut 5.
• iron transfer worked reasonably well
  • very high heat
  • laser printer
  • stuff transferred, but I missed some of the more intricate details
  • even despite that, I need to go back and redraw a lot of it.
• I intentionally left a lot of chatter in the water areas of the map, and made them wiggly, so that anything that got picked up would look like waves. This worked out okay, but not as well as I'd hoped. I'm going to go back and clear out all except a few accidental waves that were not cut at all. When inking, I am super clumsy and basically light up all sorts of chatter.
• I could also see trimming off the edges of the lino, instead of leaving them. This would mean not a pure rectangle block for printing, but I think that might be better than all the chatter I end up inking.
• I built a better jig out of mat board for a backing, and a couple angled pieces of matboard to create a rectangle to hold the block. It worked out okay.

next time

• re-try acetone transfer, with pure acetone
  • edit from future: pure acetone worked WAY BETTER.
• or if I do a tracing instead, print the artwork in a gray shade, so that I can see my tracing lines show up.