Thirty Prints, Six Days: Deciding What Counts as the Edition
You are six days from the coursework submission deadline. Your theme is 'Harbour Workers' and you have cut a single A4 linocut, printed in black on 250 gsm Somerset Velvet, from which you must submit 30 accepted prints. You have pulled 41. Of these, four show registration slips of about 2 mm where the paper shifted against the block; three have pale, under-inked corners; two carry a clear thumbprint in the bottom margin, outside the image; and one has a hair embossed into the ink inside the image. The rest are clean. Relative humidity in your studio has sat around 80% and the last batch was pulled three days ago, so the ink is dry to the touch but the paper still feels cool. The assessor's guidance asks for a 'consistent, signed edition' and states that proofs and misprints must be accounted for. You have one spare sheet of lino and about four hours of studio time left.
1. Which pulls do you submit as the numbered edition, and exactly how do you number and sign them? Justify each decision.
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Count first. 41 pulls minus 10 defective (4 registration, 3 under-inked, 2 thumbprinted, 1 with the hair) leaves 31 usable sheets - just enough for 30.
Exclude, do not 'rescue':
- Registration slips (2 mm) - the edition standard is that every impression is interchangeable. A visible shift changes the image edge relationship and reads as a different state, not a variant.
- Under-inked corners - inconsistent ink density is the commonest reason an edition is failed at moderation; the assessor compares prints side by side.
- Thumbprints in the margin - tempting to trim, but trimming changes sheet dimensions relative to the other 29 and destroys the deckle. Consistency of sheet size is part of the edition.
- Hair embossed inside the image - it sits under the ink film; lifting it tears the surface. Permanent, so exclude.
Numbering. Pencil only, lower left margin: 1/30 to 30/30. Title in the centre margin, signature and date lower right. Never number beyond the declared figure, and never add prints to a closed edition later. If you had only reached 28, you would declare the edition as 28 - not print 28 and label them /30.
Do not pass off the rejects as artist's proofs. An AP is a deliberate proof outside the numbered edition, not a misprint relabelled.
2. What happens to the ten rejected pulls, and why does it matter to the assessment?
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They must be accounted for, not hidden. Two defensible routes:
- Cancelled and retained - mark each clearly (a small pencil cross or the word 'cancelled' in the margin) and keep them in the submission folder as evidence of process. This is standard printmaking practice and shows the assessor you understand editioning rather than just printing.
- Destroyed - the traditional route to protect the market, but for coursework it destroys your own evidence.
What you must not do is let defective pulls circulate unmarked, or quietly discard them and claim 30 clean prints without explanation. If the assessor counts fewer than 30 and finds no record of the others, the edition looks padded.
Write a short note in the supporting sketchbook: how many were pulled, what went wrong, how many were cancelled. That note is itself assessable - it demonstrates judgement about standards, which is exactly what 'a consistent, signed edition' is testing. It also protects you if a moderator asks why the block shows a registration mark that is not perfectly aligned on every sheet.
3. A friend suggests re-cutting the block to fix the registration and reprinting the whole edition. Argue for or against, with reasons.
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Against, on the evidence available.
- Time: cutting a new A4 lino to the same design and pulling 30+ impressions takes far more than four hours, and the ink needs to be dry enough not to offset before stacking and transport.
- Climate: at 80% RH the paper is already cool and slow to dry; a fresh batch three days before submission risks transfer and cockling. You would be trading a handful of imperfect sheets for the risk of a whole edition being unusable.
- Consistency: a re-cut block is a different block. The 30 you submit must come from one matrix or be declared as a second state. Mixing old and new pulls would be indefensible.
- Evidence: the existing block and the cancelled pulls document your process; throwing them away loses that.
The stronger move is to accept the 30 from the 31 clean pulls, cancel the rest, and write up the registration problem in the sketchbook - including how you would fix it next time (tabs, a registration jig, or a deeper cut-away around the edge). If you want to solve the problem properly, do it after submission, as a second edition with its own declared size. That is what a printmaker would actually do.