I started carving my linocut block today. The how-to I found online instructed me to carve out the large areas first with the largest carving bit I had to remove material. I did my carving pieces as you can see in the photo to the left. I also used my X-Acto knife to begin cutting around the finer details of the image.

You cannot carve with the X-Acto blade straight down. You will need to carve along the lines at a 45 degree angel to give some rigidity to the black areas that will hold ink. If you press to hard and the cuts are not at 45 degrees, the image will fold and smear the ink instead of providing a clear image. I will be finishing this carving tomorrow and I will do another update then.

Thank you for reading!