I was rooting around, I prefer to use the term systematically searching, in one of my plans chests trying to select just which prints to put into the Swaffham Visual Arts Festival in October when the boss said ‘why don’t you put some of those lovely make-ready prints on the blog’. Why not indeed, so here’s the first of them. No title, no plan in production, a make-ready is a sheet I always use to check that everything on the press is working perfectly, the pressure correct and the image or type has sufficient ink before I commit the work to the paper that I am using on the print run. The images that appear are truly random and some really are mistakes too, but that is part of the charm. These colourful sheets teach you about pressure, overprinting, transparent inks, opaque inks you name it and you also discover new ideas, overprints and finishes from the images that build-up and gradually appear. In a way they become a one-off print in their own right. I love them because they always seem like a stained glass window. Now that really would be something to try.
Make-ready Print. Letterforms and grids. An edition of one.
John Richardson Lino Prints 