I made this little Celtic-styled fox print for the 2026 Open Print Exchange. I wanted to join this exhibition last year after I got my Postcard Press, but was not able to get my frog done in time. The fox has been very educational. I am really glad I took the time to let it teach me.
I sketched out my fox by hand, then traced and refined it into a vector in Inkscape. I did some fiddling with the shapes for the two colors to create some overlap so that it would not require hairline registration. Excitingly, I ended up getting hairline registration pretty consistently anyway.
The plates are laser-engraved rubber, cut to align exactly.
I made a custom registration system for the Postcard Press using laser-cut sheets of thin clear acrylic, with tabs to attach the paper cut from 7mil clear mylar. I will try to do more of a breakdown of that and how it works soon.
The paper is Awagami Bamboo Select. I printed the smoother side. I scored, folded, and tore a large sheet into 70mm by 100mm pieces. Since the finished prints were to be 70mm square, the extra 30mm on the long axis gave me a place to attach the registration tabs where I wouldn’t have to worry about damaging the surface of the paper. Even proper drafting tape had a tendency to want to lift a layer off the surface. After printing, I used a 70mm square piece of acrylic as a scoring guide, and tore off the extra 30mm from each print.
The ink is Schmincke Aqua Linoprint Ink in burnt sienna and sepia brown.
I actually did five different print runs with different plates and other adjustments before I got prints I liked. With the first runs, I had spoilage of fifty percent or more. On the last run, all of the prints were successful. I can talk about that some more, if anyone is interested.
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