Relief printing flips your usual instinct on its head. With a pencil you add the marks you want. With relief (lino) printing you take away everything you DON'T want — you carve it off the block, ink the surface that's left standing, and press it onto paper. The carved-away bits stay paper-white; the raised surface prints.
The Backwards Bit, Made Simple
Picture a flat lino block. Whatever you carve away becomes the white of your print; whatever you leave raised catches the ink and becomes the colour. So you're not drawing your landscape — you're drawing its negative, deciding which parts get to stay up and print. It feels odd for about five minutes, then it clicks: carve the sky away and it prints white; leave the hills standing and they print solid.
The cycle is always the same four moves. First, carve the block — take off the areas you want blank. Second, ink the raised surface with a roller (a brayer), an even film, not a flood. Third, press paper firmly onto the inked block. Fourth, peel — and there's your print. Then do it again, and again: those are your multiples.
Colour Comes from Layering
A single carved block gives you one colour. To get a landscape with a sky, hills and foreground in different colours, you layer — and there are two classic ways. Multi-block printing uses a separate block for each colour: one for the blue sky, one for the green hills, one for the dark foreground, each printed over the last onto the same sheet. Reduction printing (the clever, slightly nerve-racking one) uses one block: print your lightest colour first, then carve away a bit more, print the next colour over the top, carve away more, print again. The block slowly gets eaten down to nothing, but each carve-and-print adds another colour layer. You can never go back — once it's carved, it's gone.
Keep Your Layers in Order
The order is the whole trick. Lightest ink down first across the broad areas, then carve away whatever you want to keep that colour, then print the next colour only where the block still stands. By the final dark layer you're printing just the thin lines — the tree trunks, the fence, the deep shadow — over a landscape that already has its sky and its hills. Get the order right and a rich, multi-colour print builds itself.