The raw material

I’ll freely admit I’m not the cleanest person in the world, but during an odd spell of spring-cleaning I stumbled across a couple of green potatoes that my girlfriend assured me would lead to a world of trouble if I attempted to cook it. Not a big fan of wasting food, I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to have a go at potato printing, an activity I’ve been hankering to do for a while now.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to re-visit potato printing, an activity I haven’t touched since primary school, and push the process to deliver results on par with any lino or woodblock print. So suddenly finding myself furnished with a ‘fresh’ batch of potatoes, I decided pursue this challenge, but instead of careful preparation and diligent research I did what I always do and dived right in. Feet first. With blue paint all over the carpet.

The original artwork

The ultimate goal of this exercise was to produce a decent two-colour print, so to begin I drew a simple illustration (or what I thought was a simple illustration) that would be easy to carve. Without giving the process much thought, I decided to draw a ‘cursed ring’, an illustration that would eventually live up to its name. However, with the excitement of carving a mouldy potato proved too much, all foresight was promptly discarded.

The first cut is the deepest

Transferring the image to the potato

Thankfully the second step of transferring the images onto the potato sides were a doddle. Who’d have guessed a lowly ink-jet print would transfer simply by being held against the potato’s surface? The beauty of this process was that the illustration naturally inverted on contact with the potato for a correct print.

Art that's food for thought

On carving was where the problems began. I came to realise that my chosen design was just too difficult to carve. I came to understand that although they are somewhat vital to illustration in general – lines are just something that potatoes struggle with. Especially lines that are below 3pt. On reflection what was I thinking with that design, it even had tones!

With the pain (and I mean pain – those penknives are sharp) of cutting fine lines too much, I decided to amend the design on the fly, dropping the ring part of the design to focus on the blocky shapes of the crystal. Raw fingered I hoped that a bigger, cooler, skull would distract from my god-awful carving. And the blood.

No pain, no gain

Inking the potato proved to be a little tricky – if not only for my ineptitude. Somehow I managed to spill blue paint over the carpet and most of my sketchbooks. The curious thing about this accident was that I wasn’t even using any blue paint. Let this be a rare insight into what my long-suffering girlfriend has to put up with.

However, for all the spillages, nothing could distract from the terrible print registration. To get a correct print I think I went through half of my sketch book printing and re-printing just to get the two colours to line up.

The scaled back design

The final artwork, 23 sheets later

The end result was passable. I’d managed to print a fairly readable two-colour illustration but the phrase “close, but no cigar” rang rather too loudly – the result wasn’t really an illustration of anything. Knowing I could do something better, and armed with the points picked up throughout the process, I decided to give the exercise another go.

Next: Potato Printing – Second Attempt