brayer. This is what you’ll use to charge or ink your
brayer. Use your brayer to roll out the ink into an
evenly coated rectangle. You don’t need to apply
pressure when doing this. Just let the weight of the
brayer do the work.
Keep rolling it out until you get an orange-peel effect
in the surface of the ink. If you have too much ink on
your palette, you’ll get smears when you’re rolling
and you’ll see globs of ink on the brayer instead of a
nice even coating.
5.IN K THE PLATE
Once the brayer is fully charged with ink
you can roll it onto the linoleum. It will take several
passes to get the linoleum plate fully covered. You’ll
need to charge the brayer several times during this
initial inking. You want to find that happy medium
of good coverage, but not too much ink. You can try
a test print on newsprint or another inexpensive
paper if you’d like to test your ink coverage.
6.PULL A PRIN T
Hopefully your hands are still ink-free at this
point, but if not, be sure to wipe them off before
grabbing a sheet of paper. Use an L-shaped piece of
mat board to align your paper correctly.
Q: What type of brayer should I use?
A: This is also a matter of personal preference,
depending on how you like to print. A really hard
brayer will roll the ink right on top of the surface of
the plate. A softer brayer will squish down slightly
into some of the carved out areas and will deposit
ink on more than one level. I use a softer brayer
because I like some of the line work in the white
areas to get inked.
