After spending the early winter working on This Box is for Good, Lisa and I are turning our attention to new print projects, and part of this includes getting the shop set up with the right tools, inks, and whirligig’s to allow us to print what our imaginations dictate.

Today I wanted to take a new set of Ternes Burton register pins out for a ride: I’d never used them before, and I wanted to see how they worked.

I needed something to print, and the something needed to require registration. Remembering that Olivia used to call the “leap year” the “leapy ear,” I decided to print an ear as a reduction print.

I sketched an ear onto a small lino block, and set aside some areas to be grey and some to be black. I carved away everything that was to not print at all, and then used the block to print a layer of grey. Next  I carved away everything I wanted to leave grey, leaving just want I wanted to overprint in black and printed the black layer.

The job of the register pins is to keep the paper in exactly the same place from print to print, so that the colours “line up” in the right way (here’s a great video that illustrates their utility). The register pins did exactly what they’re supposed to do, and the registration across the edition of five prints was bang-on.