But then the question of which blade to use first, right because there's five blades, I, it depends on your design. It depends on your design. If you have a lot of areas that you're going to carve away, I would start with that bigger blade, the wider gouge so that you can really start to just strip away a lot of that linoleum. So for example, this is real faded from what transpired but you can still tell I was going to carve away all of the background. So that's a lot of space on I'm going to carve away so I would probably start with blade number five that wide gouge so that I can just start to carve all that away without getting too close to my shapes yet. When I'm outlining my shapes, I'll probably go to a number one or two to outline those shapes.

And then you see here I wanted to carve away this center of vest so I'd probably use a two or even the one on there. So as you get to the smaller spaces, use the smaller blade as you're working with bigger places you're carving way use that big blade if you do have a lot of detail and a lot of have different components happening in your design. A good way to approach it can be to start with these smaller blade and work your way up. Because you can always carve away more, but you can't add stuff back in unless you really try with super glue, but you don't want to go there. So work from small to large if you have a lot of that detail going on, because that is a useful way to slowly take away parts of the linoleum without taking away too much too fast.

If you have circles in your design, a way to approach that is to turn your block as you carve. So for example, here's a circle on mine instead of just trying to come around like that. You don't want to do that. Start here and then just turn your block as you put a little pressure into the blade. And you can see that that starts to carve it. So I switched from the blade five there really was blade to carve away a lot of this background to a blade two, which is more of a V shape, but still wider than that number one, and I'm using the V shape because that can be really useful for doing outlines or internal spaces, or especially when you have like lines that you want to carve away more than just a thin space but like this internal cavity, the number two V shape can be really good for that.

So that's what I'm using right now. A question that comes up a lot when I teach printmaking is how deep Do I have to carve? Does it need to be super deep? And the answer is no, this is not an excavation you don't have to dig into the block. In fact that's not going to be easy for you in the carving process. You really want to stick to that 45 degree angle where you're just carving smooth as butter and of like you're just found this groove and you're rolling with it.

You're not digging out the linoleum really the ink is not going to pour down in there it's going to set on top of that surface. So long as you don't have lines that are just barely scratching it. If they're just beneath the surface enough, they won't catch that ache. A question that comes up sometimes when people are carving away, an internal part of the shape or a design is how to get rid of the little ridges that happen. So you can see on here, there's all these ridges happening from where I've been carving. And in here, you can see that there's all these little ridges in the triangle.

So in terms of the background, sometimes I can add to your design, because that's a quality of printmaking that really lends itself to feeling human made right made by hand. And that can be really precious with relief printing really unique to this type of process. If you want it completely clean and none of that to show then you would just come back over, potentially, especially in this background with a bigger blade and carve over those Ridge lines over those little mountain lines. As for things that are like this where it's an internal place, I would use an even smaller blade and come in and start to dig those out a little bit. Start to carve those away. A lot of people ask what to do about these shavings.

I like to just brush it off. Or you can do this or kind of knock it out of here. Or what I usually do is I just keep carving, and it'll push itself out of the tool so you can find the way that works best for you. So now that you've carved your block, congratulations, go ahead and take a picture, upload it to the class so that we can all see your wonderful progress.